From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:12:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:12:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Brief History of Time Balls Message-ID: Op-Ed Contributor: A Brief History of Time Balls NYT December 30, 2004 By SCOTT HULER RALEIGH, N.C. [Happy Gregorian calendar new year, everyone! As opposed to fiscal new year, pay new year, Julian new year, Islamic new year. This is a general interest article for all my lists. Though I am only half-way through my fourth book since abandoning reality on my sixtieth birthday, there are too many topical articles, like this one, for me to keep holding them until I finish the book, which is Revelation: Four Views and is not a good book, since neither it nor any other treatment of the last book of the Bible ever notices the blatant contradiction in the pre-tribulationist pre-millenarian views that maintain that signs, such as the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, are proof of the coming of the end, when such events take place AFTER the Rapture. What I am learning is just how far those with a particular view will stuff and twist a sacred text into it and yet still disagree among themselves. I am eager to learn whether this stuffing and twisting takes place on any such scale outside the Occident. [I will be sending five to ten articles a day until Lent, which begins early this Gregorian year, namely February 9, and which I commemorate by suspending my forwardings for forty days and forty nights. You'll be interested to know that I fulfilled my desire ever since 1965 when I got a copy of Wolfgang Schmieder's monumental Bach Werke Verzeichnis and desired to get recordings of all of Bach's music. Two editions came out, on Telefunken (old instruments, Haroncourt and Leonhart chief conductors) and H?nnsler (new instruments, which I prefer, Rilling, chief conductor). The latter set came in a huge box of 171 individually-wrapped compact discs for $1800. I got an e-message from Berkshire Record Outlet informing me of new additions to their catalog, including H?nnsler recordings. Suspecting that these may include Bach recordings, I, along with several hundred other people, logged onto the site. After half an hour of retrying, I was able to order the set, for $200! They were quickly sold out. The set I got was repackaged into four-in-one albums, which fitted into two boxes 11 inches (28 cm.) long. No booklets, but rather two CD-ROMs which had them as PDFs. Naturally, I am glad not to have to find room for the original set. [I'll send messages to everyone on my personal lists and, where I think it of interests, to lists I subscribe to, at least for a few days. Let me know your preferences. You will not be flooded with messages, as sometimes in the past. I will not have read most of them in detail, since I want to continue to abandon reality by reading fiction.] [Next up is a very long file about my favorite Jewish intellectual, Susan Sontag. I read all of these obituaries, appreciations, reviews, and her own writings, as well as the essay that launched her career, "Notes on 'Camp,'" a brilliant essay, though camp is not my sensibility. Then the best article about the Bush election and redemption. Something on Basque separatism, of which I approve, while at the same time wanting international institutions to be strenghtened for facilitation purposes and which do not have to be governmental. And a fifth item on the progress of women's wages.] WHEN the time ball drops above Times Square in New York just before midnight on New Year's Eve, Americans will, together, do something that has otherwise become an almost entirely independent and private activity: they will tell the time. New York City's annual ball drop is probably the greatest single moment of public timekeeping in the world. Yet the Times Square ball is not the world's most important time ball - nor was it the first. It wasn't even the first time ball in New York. Oh, and it isn't even dropped right. A little history first. Public time-telling began in church. In 1335, the bells of the church of San Gottardo (then Beata Vergine) began tolling the hours in Milan, ringing once at 1 a.m. and culminating in 24 chimes at midnight. It was the first time church bells had been used to announce time regularly. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, and for the first time in history, large groups of people knew the time. The Milan clock could be off by as much as 1,000 seconds a day, but that wasn't really a problem, because if nobody knew exactly what time it was, how could anyone really be late? Measurement of time improved as the centuries passed, but even into the early 18th century most people had no need for precise time. (The minute hand shows up on watches, for example, around 1700). The bells tolled hourly and that was plenty. Accuracy improved vastly during the industrial revolution and was honed at sea: ship captains needed extremely precise clocks to coordinate their celestial readings with the time those readings would occur at a known point - usually Greenwich, England (the city that later lent its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the world's standard time). John Harrison, the famous clockmaker, developed a chronometer accurate and portable enough to do the job in 1761, and ultimately changed the world. But once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at a specific moment, indicate the exact time - sailors could view it through a telescope and set their chronometers precisely. In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the world's first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth, England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor, would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward motion signaling exactly 1 p.m. The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped. (Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in longitude; we didn't get time zones until the telegraph and railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.) And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a New Year's Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year. When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in, and the tradition began. The Times Square ball isn't quite a true time ball. The eye can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball marks time with the end of its motion - hard to perceive and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward. As timekeepers became increasingly cheap, accurate, automatic and interconnected, these public time signals - not just time balls but noontime guns as well - began to disappear. Today the Greenwich time ball still drops daily, but for tourists, not navigators; time balls drop in a few other world harbors, like Christchurch, New Zealand, and Edinburgh, but most time balls are reserved for special occasions, which makes it even more comforting when, once a year, a time ball drops in New York, and we all watch. Who cares that they do it wrong? At least they do it. It's the end of a year. It's a way to mark a moment. It's a moment Americans across the country can spend together. In these fractious times, it's at least one thing we can all agree on. Scott Huler is the author of "Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/opinion/30huler.html?ex=1105449877&ei=1&en=f24f429b8caf3875 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:12:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:12:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Susan Sontag Package Message-ID: Susan Sontag Package Here comes a whole bunch of obituaries, appreciations, reviews, and her own writings. Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71 New York Times (unless specified otherwise) December 28, 2004 By MARGALIT FOX Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences - and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died yesterday morning in Manhattan. She was 71 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for the last 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978). A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater director. For four decades her work was part of the contemporary canon, discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the pages of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie "Bull Durham." Ms. Sontag's work made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term. "The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic," Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and an old friend of Ms. Sontag's, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "There was something unusually vivid about her writing. That's why even if one disagrees with it - as I did frequently - it was unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had a way of reopening questions." Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, na ve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, pass?, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull. Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels "Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992) and "In America" (2000); the essay collections "Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1969) and "Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980); the critical studies "On Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story collection "I, Etcetera" (1978). One of her most famous works, however, was not a book, but an essay, "Notes on Camp," published in 1964 and still widely read. Her most recent book, published last year, was "Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last published essays, "Regarding the Torture of Others," written in response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib, appeared in the May 23, 2004, issue of The New York Times Magazine. An Intellectual With Style Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was also a celebrity, partly because of her telegenic appearance, partly because of her outspoken statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. Through the decades her image - strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in her middle years by a sweeping streak of white - became an instantly recognizable artifact of 20th-century popular culture. Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her. For Ms. Sontag, culture encompassed a vast landscape. She wrote serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science fiction, that earlier critics disdained. She produced impassioned essays on the European writers and filmmakers she admired, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Godard. She wrote experimental novels on dreams and the nature of consciousness. She published painstaking critical dissections of photography and dance; illness, politics and pornography; and, most famously, camp. Her work, with its emphasis on the outr?, the jagged and the here and now, helped make the study of popular culture a respectable academic pursuit. What united Ms. Sontag's output was a propulsive desire to define the forces that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she sought to explain what it meant to be human in the waning years of the 20th century. To many critics, her work was bold and thrilling. Interviewed in The Times Magazine in 1992, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. "Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," he said. "Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate." A Bevy of Detractors Others were less enthralled. Some branded Ms. Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a popularizer with a gift for aphorism who could boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving Howe called her "a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from grandmother's patches.") Some regarded her tendency to revisit her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. Some saw her scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. (Ms. Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith because she had read Nietzsche.) In person Ms. Sontag could be astringent, particularly if she felt she had been misunderstood. She grew irritated when reporters asked how many books she had in her apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (15,000; no television set). But she could also be warm and girlish, speaking confidingly in her rich, low voice, her feet propped casually on the nearest coffee table. She laughed readily, and when she discussed something that engaged her passionately (and there were many things), her dark eyes often filled with tears. Ms. Sontag had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for getting into trouble. She could be provocative to the point of being inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay; she would revise her position some years later. She celebrated the communist societies of Cuba and North Vietnam; just as provocatively, she later denounced communism as a form of fascism. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she wrote in The New Yorker, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." And in 2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied. Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Her father was a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long periods, leaving Susan and her younger sister in the care of relatives. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of tuberculosis. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma, her mother moved the family to Tucson, spending the next several years there. In Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Nathan Sontag, a World War II veteran sent there to recuperate. The couple were married - Susan took her stepfather's name - and the family moved to Los Angeles. For Susan, who graduated from high school before her 16th birthday, the philistinism of American culture was a torment she vowed early to escape. "My greatest dream," she later wrote, "was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people." She would get her wish - Ms. Sontag burst onto the scene with "Notes on Camp," which was published in Partisan Review - but not before she earned a bachelor's and two master's degrees from prestigious American universities; studied at Oxford on a fellowship; and married, became a mother and divorced eight years later, all by the time she turned 26. After graduating from high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1951. At Chicago she wandered into a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, who would write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking, 1959). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was 17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in blue jeans, her black hair spilling down her back. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian. Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag earned her master's degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the second in philosophy the next year. She began work on a Ph.D., but did not complete her dissertation. In 1952 she and Dr. Rieff became the parents of a son. Ms. Sontag is survived by her son, David Rieff, who lives in Manhattan and was for many years her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (A journalist, he wrote "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West," published by Simon & Schuster in 1995.) Also surviving is her younger sister, Judith Cohen of Maui. After further study at Oxford and in Paris, Ms. Sontag was divorced from Dr. Rieff in 1958. In early 1959 she arrived in New York with, as she later described it, "$70, two suitcases and a 7 year old." She worked as an editor at Commentary and juggled teaching jobs at City College, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. She published her first essays, critical celebrations of modernists she admired, as well as her first novel, "The Benefactor" (1963), an exploration of consciousness and dreams. Shaking Up the Establishment With "Notes on Camp" Ms. Sontag fired a shot across the bow of the New York critical establishment, which included eminences like Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. Interlaced with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, that essay illuminated a particular modern sensibility - one that had been largely the province of gay culture - which centered deliciously on artifice, exaggeration and the veneration of style. "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement," Ms. Sontag wrote. "The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion." If that essay has today lost its capacity to shock, it is a reflection of how thoroughly Ms. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to an underground aesthetic that was not then widely known. "She found in camp an aesthetic that was very different from what the straight world had acknowledged up to that point, and she managed to make camp 'straight' in a way," Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and the art critic for The Nation, said yesterday in a telephone interview. "I think she prepared the ground for the pop revolution, which was in many ways essentially a gay revolution, through Warhol and others. She didn't make that art, but she brought it to consciousness. She gave people a vocabulary for talking about it and thinking about it." The article made Ms. Sontag an international celebrity, showered with lavish, if unintentionally ridiculous, titles ("a literary pinup," "the dark lady of American letters," "the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant-garde"). Championing Style Over Content In 1966 Ms. Sontag published her first essay collection, "Against Interpretation." That book's title essay, in which she argued that art should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, helped cement her reputation as a champion of style over content. It was a position she could take to extremes. In the essay "On Style," published in the same volume, Ms. Sontag offended many readers by upholding the films of Leni Riefenstahl as masterworks of aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. Ms. Sontag would eventually reconsider her position in the 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism." Though she thought of herself as a novelist, it was through her essays that Ms. Sontag became known. As a result she was fated to write little else for the next quarter-century. She found the form an agony: a long essay took from nine months to a year to complete, often requiring 20 or more drafts. "I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said in a 1992 interview. " 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day." That book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1978, explored the role of the photographic image, and the act of picture-taking in contemporary culture. The crush of photographs, Ms. Sontag argued, has shaped our perceptions of the world, numbing us to depictions of suffering. She would soften that position when she revisited the issue in "Regarding the Pain of Others." The Washington Post Book World called "On Photography" "a brilliant analysis," adding that it " merely describes a phenomenon we take as much for granted as water from the tap, and how that phenomenon has changed us - a remarkable enough achievement, when you think about it." In the mid-1970's Ms. Sontag learned she had breast cancer. Doctors gave her a 10 percent chance of surviving for two years. She scoured the literature for a treatment that might save her, underwent a mastectomy and persuaded her doctors to give her a two-and-a-half-year course of radiation. Out of her experience came "Illness as Metaphor," which examined the cultural mythologizing of disease (tuberculosis as the illness of 19th-century romantics, cancer a modern-day scourge). Although it did not discuss her illness explicitly, it condemned the often militaristic language around illness ("battling" disease, the "war" on cancer) that Ms. Sontag felt simultaneously marginalized the sick and held them responsible for their condition.. In "AIDS and Its Metaphors" Ms. Sontag discussed the social implications of the disease, which she viewed as a "cultural plague" that had replaced cancer as the modern bearer of stigma. She would return to the subject of AIDS in her acclaimed short story "The Way We Live Now," originally published in The New Yorker and included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Although Ms. Sontag was strongly identified with the American left during the Vietnam era, in later years her politics were harder to classify. In the essay "Trip to Hanoi," which appears in "Styles of Radical Will," she wrote glowingly of a visit to North Vietnam. But in 1982 she delivered a stinging blow to progressives in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan. There, at a rally in support of the Solidarity movement in Poland, she denounced European communism as "fascism with a human face." In 1992, weary of essays, Ms. Sontag published "The Volcano Lover," her first novel in 25 years. Though very much a novel of ideas - it explored, among other things, notions of aesthetics and the psychology of obsessive collecting - the book was also a big, old-fashioned historical romance. It told the story of Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century British envoy to the court of Naples; his wife, Emma ("that Hamilton woman"); and her lover, Lord Nelson, the naval hero. The book spent two months on The New York Times best-seller list. Reviewing the novel in The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: "One thing that makes 'The Volcano Lover' such a delight to read is the way it throws off ideas and intellectual sparks, like a Roman candle or Catherine wheel blazing in the night. Miniature versions of 'Don Giovanni' and 'Tosca' lie embedded, like jewels, in the main narrative; and we are given as well some charmingly acute cameos of such historical figures as Goethe and the King and Queen of Naples." Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," was loosely based on the life of the 19th-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who immigrated to California to start a utopian community. Though "In America" received a National Book Award, critical reception was mixed. Then accusations of plagiarism surfaced. As The Times reported in May 2000, a reader identified at least a dozen passages as being similar to those in four other books about the real Modjeska, including Modjeska's memoirs. Except for a brief preface expressing a general debt to "books and articles by and on Modjeska," Ms. Sontag did not specifically acknowledge her sources. Interviewed for The Times article, Ms. Sontag defended her method. "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain," she said. "I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. I have these books. I've looked at these books. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions." Ms. Sontag's other work includes the play "Alice in Bed" (1993); "A Susan Sontag Reader" (1982), with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick; and four films, including "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) and "Brother Carl" (1971). She also edited works by Barthes, Antonin Artaud, Danilo Kis and other writers. Ms. Sontag was the subject of an unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon" (Norton, 2000), and of several critical studies, including "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me," by Craig Seligman (Counterpoint/Perseus, 2004). She was the president of the PEN American Center from 1987 to 1989. In a 1992 interview with The Times Magazine, Ms. Sontag described the creative force that animated "The Volcano Lover," putting her finger on the sensibility that would inform all her work: "I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html An Appreciation | Susan Sontag: A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in Glamour December 29, 2004 By CHARLES McGRATH Susan Sontag, who died yesterday at 71, was one of the few intellectuals with whom Americans have ever been on a first-name basis. It wasn't intimacy that gave her this status; it was that like Marilyn and like Judy, she was so much a star that she didn't need a surname. In certain circles, at least, she was just Susan, even to people who had never met her but who would nevertheless talk knowledgeably and intimately about her latest piece in The New York Review of Books, her position on Sarajevo, her verdict on the new W. G. Sebald book. She brought to the world of ideas not just an Olympian rigor but a glamour and sexiness it had seldom seen before. Part of the appeal was her own glamour - the black outfits, the sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair. The other part was the dazzle of her intelligence and the range of her knowledge; she had read everyone, especially all those forbidding Europeans - Artaud, Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gombrowicz, Walser and the rest - who loomed off on what was for many of us the far and unapproachable horizon. Nor was she shy about letting you know how much she had read (and, by implication, how much you hadn't), or about decreeing the correct opinion to be held on each of the many subjects she turned her mind to. That was part of the appeal, too: her seriousness and her conviction, even if it was sometimes a little crazy-making. Consistency was not something Ms. Sontag worried about overly much because she believed that the proper life of the mind was one of re-examination and re-invention. Ms. Sontag could be a divisive figure, and she was far from infallible, as when she embraced revolutionary communism after traveling to Hanoi in 1968 and later declared the United States to be a "doomed country ... founded on a genocide." But what her opponents sometimes failed to credit was her willingness to change her mind; by the 80's she was denouncing communism for its human-rights abuses, and by the 90's she had extended her critique to include the left in general, for its failure to encourage intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda. She had found herself "moved to support things which I did not think would be necessary to support at all in the past," she said in a rueful interview, adding, "Like seriousness, for instance." Not that she was ever unserious for very long. There was about most of her work a European sobriety and high-mindedness and an emphasis on the moral, rather than sensual, pleasures of art and the imagination. Her reputation rests on her nonfiction - especially the essays in "Against Interpretation" and "Styles of Radical Will" and the critical studies "On Photography" and "Illness as Metaphor" - while the 1967 novel "Death Kit," written to a highbrow formula of dissociation, now seems all but unreadable. For a while Ms. Sontag took the French position that in the right hands criticism was an even higher art form than imaginative literature, but in the 80's she announced that she was devoting herself to fiction. She wrote the indelible short story "The Way We Live Now," one of the most affecting fictional evocations of the AIDS era, and in 1992 she published a novel, "The Volcano Lover," that had all the earmarks of the kind of novel she had once made fun of. It was historical and it was a romance, about the love affair of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Being a Sontag production, it was of course brainy and stuffed with fact-laden research, but as many critics pointed out, there was also a lightness and even - who would have guessed? - an old-fashioned wish to entertain. Much the same was true of her last novel, "In America," which came out in 2000, about a Polish actress who comes to the United States at the end of the 19th century. Ms. Sontag was too much a critic and essayist to stick to her resolve; her last book, "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), was nonfiction, an outspoken tract on how we picture suffering. Last May she expanded on those ideas for an article in The New York Times Magazine about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. This piece was classic, provocative Sontag. But those late novels, playful and theatrical, are a reminder that behind that formidable, opinionated and immensely learned persona there was another Sontag, warmer and more vulnerable, whom we got to see only in glimpses. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/books/29appr.html 'Regarding the Pain of Others' March 23, 2003 Reviwed by JOHN LEONARD Toward the end of ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' her coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering, Susan Sontag loses her temper. As usual she's been playing a solitary hand, shuffling contradictions, dealing provocations, turning over anguished faces, numbing numerals, even a jumping jack (''we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears''). But she seems personally offended by those ''citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.'' And she is all of a sudden ferocious: ''To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. . . . It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain . . . consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.'' So much, then, for Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and their French-fried American fellows in the media studies programs, looking down on staged events as if from zeppelins, or like the kings of Burma on the backs of elephants, remote and twitchy among the pixels, with multiple views in slo-mo, intimate focus or broad scan, and an IV-feed of chitchat. When we think about the pictures we have seen from Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya, about the videotapes available to us of Rodney King being beaten and Daniel Pearl being murdered, media theory seems merely impudent. Yet Sontag has no more use for the pure of heart and perpetually incredulous who are always shocked by the wounds of the world, by evidence of ''hands-on'' cruelty and proof ''that depravity exists.'' Where have they been? After a century and a half of photojournalistic witness, ''a vast repository'' of ''atrocious images'' already exists to remind us of what people can do to each other. At this late date, to be surprised is to be morally defective: ''No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.'' So there is suffering, and there are cameras, and it is possible to worry about the motives of the men and women behind the cameras, whether one may be too arty, another a bit mercenary, a third a violence junkie, as it is possible to worry about whether our looking at the pictures they bring back from the wound is voyeuristic or pornographic; whether such witness, competing for notice among so many other clamors, seems more authentic the more it's amateurish (accidental, like satellite surveillance); whether excess exposure to atrocity glossies dulls Jack and jades Jill; or whether. . . . But then again, maybe these worries are self-indulgent and beside the point, which should be to think our way past what happened to why. ''It is not a defect,'' Sontag says, ''that we do not suffer enough'' when we see these images: ''Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?'' Photographs ''haunt'' us; ''narratives can make us understand.'' As thinking people used to do, before what Sontag calls ''the era of shopping,'' we are invited to make distinctions and connections, and then maybe fix something. Or have all of us already sold, leased or leveraged our skepticism, our intellectual property rights and our firstborn child for a seat at the table and a shot at the trough? Sontag of course has done our homework for us, her usual archaeology. She follows the trail of photojournalism from Roger Fenton in the Valley of Death after the charge of the Light Brigade, to Mathew Brady's illustrating of America's Civil War, to Robert Capa among Spanish Republicans, to the horrors of Buchenwald and Hiroshima, to famine in India and carnage in Biafra and napalm in Vietnam and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. After consulting Goya on what a victorious army does to a civilian population, she takes us to Tuol Sleng, near Phnom Penh, to look at the photographs the Khmer Rouge took of thousands of suspected ''intellectuals'' and ''counterrevolutionaries'' (meaning Cambodians who had gone to school, spoke a foreign language or wore glasses) after they were tortured but before they were murdered. She reminds us of how hard it is for the image makers to keep up with improvements in the technology of torture and execution, from the stake, the wheel, the gallows tree and the strappado to smart bombs dreamed up on bitmaps in virtual realities. (Long-distance mayhem gets longer by the minute. The British who bombed Iraq in the 1920's and the Germans who bombed Spain in the 1930's could actually see their civilian targets, whereas the recent American bombings of Afghanistan were orchestrated at computer screens in Tampa, Fla.) She has shrewd things to say about colonial wars, memory museums, Christian iconography, lynching postcards, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille and St. Sebastian; about ''sentimentality,'' ''indecency'' and the ''overstimulation'' Wordsworth warned us would lead to to (lovely phrase!) ''savage torpor.'' And, as usual, she provokes. It probably isn't true that ''not even pacifists'' any longer believe war can be abolished, that photos have a ''deeper bite'' in the memory bank than movies or television, that ''the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,'' and that ''most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.'' I don't know, and neither does she. On the other hand, when she revises her own conclusions from ''On Photography'' to say she's no longer so sure that shock has ''term limits,'' or that ''repeated exposure'' in ''our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities,'' I agree with her for no other reason than I want to. Her job is not to win a verdict from a jury, but to make us think. And so she has for 40 years. Never mind that Cyndi Lauper reputation from those essays in ''Against Interpretation'' on happenings, camp and science fiction. Maybe in the early 60's girls just wanted to have fun. By the time of ''Styles of Radical Will,'' she was already Emma Goldman, if not Rosa Luxemburg, reviewing Vietnam as if it were a Godard film. But there was nothing playful about ''On Photography,'' which deserved all those prizes, or ''Illness as Metaphor,'' which actually saved lives, or ''Under the Sign of Saturn,'' where essays so admiring of Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti reminded us that she had always been the best student Kenneth Burke ever had, and could be relied upon to value Simone Weil over Jack Smith. ''If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky,'' she would write years later, ''then -- of course -- I'd choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?'' Yes, she had to, with the culture she cared about going down the tubes. Against that gurgle and flush, she sent up kites and caught the lightning bottled in ''Where the Stress Falls,'' asking us to think the prose of poets and the ''excruciations'' of everybody else, from Machado de Assis to Jorge Luis Borges to Adam Zagajewski to Robert Walser to Danilo Kis to Roland Barthes, before he was struck down by a laundry truck on his way to his mother's, not to mention side excursions to the dance of Lucinda Childs, the photography of Annie Leibovitz and the 15-hour version of Alfred Doblin's ''Berlin Alexanderplatz'' that Rainer Werner Fassbinder managed to make for German television. All this, plus what she found out about herself under the influence of morphine and chemotherapy, and an essay, hilarious in its very conception, on ''Wagner's Fluids.'' Then there were the novels. If the early ones, ''The Benefactor'' and ''Death Kit,'' smelled of the lab, the recent ones, ''The Volcano Lover'' and ''In America,'' are full of ocean and desert airs. It is an amazing, buoyant transformation, by a writer with as much staying power as intellectual wherewithal -- a writer, moreover, who went a dozen times to Sarajevo while the rest of us were watching the Weather Channel -- and still she's niggled at even by people she hasn't sued. Late in the first act of ''Radiant Baby,'' the new musical about Keith Haring, they bring on a highfalutin critic. She is trousered and turtlenecked in black, with a white streak in her dark mane. She is, of course, a Susan Sontag doll, maybe even a bunraku puppet. You almost expect her to quote Kleist. How remarkable, when even the best-known critics in the history of Western culture pass among us as anonymously as serial killers, that this one should end up emblematic, a kind of avant-garde biker chick, and also be so envied and resented for it. From the political right, you'd expect vituperation, a punishment for her want of piety or bloodthirstiness about 9/11, as if all over hate radio, Fox News and the blogosphere, according to some mystical upgrade of the Domino Theory, every pip was caused to squeak. But in our aggrieved bohemias? Who cares that her picture has been taken by Harry Hess, Peter Hujar, Irving Penn, Thomas Victor, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz, not even counting Woody Allen for purposes of ''Zelig''? That she's shown up as a character in unkind novels by Judith Grossman, Alfred Chester, Edmund White, Philippe Sollers, Francis King and Sarah Schulman? The only Sontag who matters is the one who keeps on publishing her own books. ''One result of lavishing a good part of your one and only life on your books,'' she wrote in 1995, ''is that you come to feel that, as a person, you are faking it.'' I hope not, but I don't have time to find out because I have to look up, at her recommendation, another writer I've never read, Multatuli, who's written another novel I never heard of, ''Max Havelaar.'' Anyway, in the course of admiring so many serious thinkers, she became one. If, however, we must plight some troth to the cult of Gaia, this is how I imagine her, as the poet Paul Claudel saw the ornamental sandstone dancing maiden in the jungles of Cambodia, one of those apsaras that Andre Malraux tried to steal -- smiling, writes Claudel, her ''Ethiopian smile, dancing a kind of sinister cancan over the ruins.'' She knows lots of things the rest of us only wish we did. Think of Susan Sontag as the Rose of Angkor Wat. John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation, movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and television for New York magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/books/review/023LEONAT.html 'In America' March 12, 2000 Reviewed by SARAH KERR The narrator of ''In America'' is unidentified save for a cool, cerebral voice and some quickly dropped biographical details, like youth in Arizona and California and early marriage to a formidable intellectual many years her senior, that self-consciously call to mind the novel's famous author, Susan Sontag. When we first meet the narrator, she is out walking in a winter storm. Shivering from the cold, she passes by a hotel, notices a party on the ground floor and decides to slip inside and warm up. And then something strange happens. She speaks an up-to-date lingo (she ''crashed'' the party, she talks of ''upgrading'' information). But inside the hotel, the guests chatter away in a language she doesn't know. Odder still, the ladies are wearing floor-length gowns, while the gentlemen have on waistcoats; the room is lighted by stinking gas lanterns, and the cabs everyone arrives in are powered not by engine but by horse. Is this some kind of gimmicky costume affair? Has the narrator unwittingly boarded a time machine? Not quite. Although she can't speak to the revelers, with a little effort she is able to suss out who they are and what era they belong to. The time and place are Russian-occupied Warsaw, 1876. The guest of honor is the leading Polish actress of the day, the lovely and charismatic Maryna Zalezowska. But here is the weird part: our guide knows all this because, it turns out, she herself has made the whole scene up. Such an actress really existed, and lived out adventures roughly resembling those the book is about to chronicle. But everything else about this party, from the small talk to the church bells echoing across the city, the red-faced servant huffing beneath a load of firewood and the baked black grouse with partridges, comes courtesy of the narrator's mind. She had, she confesses, been struggling to work up a story about a different gathering (another self-reference: the hotel party she first set out to describe would have taken place in the same era but in Sarajevo, a city Sontag is widely known to have visited, bravely, at the height of the bombing in the early 1990's). Instead, her imagination flew to this party in Warsaw, and here she has decided to stay. ''I thought if I listened and watched and ruminated,'' she reasons, ''taking as much time as I needed, I could understand the people in this room, that theirs would be a story that would speak to me, though how I knew this I can't explain.'' Settling into a story -- choosing a setting and characters, working out the particulars -- is an awkward process for the novelist, part whim, part a matter of waiting for the authentic detail to suggest itself; in dramatizing that process Sontag has hit on a neat metafictional truth. I dwell on this opening scene because she moves readers through it with sure-footed and wonderfully daring technique. At the same time (prelude to a battle that will rage throughout this book), the ideas about fiction that Sontag proposes seem the opposite of daring. ''Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled,'' the narrator announces, sounding a little passive and complacent. Imagination, she seems to say, is not much more than a survey of the contents of your own brain. But back to the story, which improves tenfold once the narrator gets out of the way and lets the characters do their thing. Our heroine, Maryna, is heavy-jawed and sturdily built, too old, at 35, to be strictly beautiful, but with a diva's ''skillful gestures'' and ''commanding gaze,'' which make her seem like the most gorgeous creature anyone has ever seen. Still weak from a recent battle with typhoid and fed up with the indignities of Russian occupation, she worries that she is losing her passion for acting. So she decides to give up her career and sail to America, and she persuades a full entourage -- including her decent but sexually absent husband and a young journalist who longs above all else in life to be her lover -- to accompany her. Maryna's plan, rather vague, is for everyone to pitch in toward a humble communal life somewhere, a more authentic existence; the group is inspired in part by Fourier's then fashionable ideas but most of all by the weary actress's desire to be done with the tired part of Maryna Zalezowska and take on a meaty new role. The arrival of these Polish idealists in kitschy America sets the scene for some charming historical set pieces: they nibble on that bizarre native delicacy, ''dry airy lumps made by exploding kernels of white corn,'' and at the Philadelphia Exposition Maryna marvels at a huge sculpture of Iolanthe made entirely of butter. Two members of the party who travel ahead to scout locations pick the unlikely setting of Anaheim, Calif. (today home to Disneyland, but back then, apparently, a magnet for Europeans attempting to learn farming). Living off their savings, the Poles rent a farm, read agricultural pamphlets, lay out a garden and na vely attempt to become vintners. And then, after some stark but rather beautiful months, the idyll falls apart. The failure is gradual -- drift more than rupture -- and most of the people involved seem to get over it quickly. Very quickly, in fact. The novel offers little in the way of conflict. To support her family, Maryna moves to San Francisco and returns to the stage under the easier-to-swallow name Madame Marina Zalenska. At this point in the story, some novelists might choose to focus on her insecurities about reviving her abandoned career. But this heroine is too steely to admit such doubt. ''You feel strong,'' the narrator says, saluting her willpower. ''You want to feel strong. The important thing is to go forward.'' Maryna kicks down barriers as if they were Styrofoam props. Auditions are a cinch, and famously tight-fisted impresarios stand in line to put her up in lavish penthouse suites. As in her essays, Sontag has a terrific feel for the way theatrical styles evolve, seeming vital and true when they burst on the scene, and embarrassing and bizarre the minute audiences decide they are dated. Maryna appears to stand on a threshold. Besides Shakespeare, she specializes in the corny but undeniably moving plays that dominated the 19th-century stage: weepies in the tradition of ''Camille,'' starring a heroine whose love violates social mores, leading inexorably to her gorgeous, swooning death. The poignant implication is that in a few decades Maryna may be regarded as a high priestess of dreck. But for her time she is an artist of the highest caliber: night after night, crowd and critics alike get out their handkerchiefs for her performances. That Maryna never phones in a sluggish performance, never even flubs a line, is hard to believe, but then belief may not be the point. Sontag's fiction, always ripe with ideas, has often flirted with fantasy. Early on, in the avant-garde ''Death Kit'' (1967), she probed an average man's dissociative dreams. Later, she abandoned novel writing for some 25 years, and when she returned, with ''The Volcano Lover'' (1992), her virtuosic retelling of the Lord Nelson-Lady Emma Hamilton affair, she seemed drawn to fantasy of the more traditional variety. That book, with its famous lovers and Neapolitan background, had the romantic glamour of an old Saturday matinee. ''In America'' has glamour, too, but it's all funneled into the character of Maryna, who never goofs, never seems graceless or cowardly, never does anything to contradict a worshipful saloonkeeper who declares: ''You're a star. Everyone loves you. You can do anythin' you want.'' Even Sontag, one suspects, would admit that Maryna is part fantasy -- a pure distillation of diva-ness. Almost but not quite as lively as in ''The Volcano Lover,'' Sontag's prose here is lithe, playful: in spite of the listless plot, this book has flow. Indeed, ''In America'' reads so smoothly that one could almost accuse Sontag of placing too few demands on her readers. Stimulating ideas, as usual, lurk around every corner. But they tend to arrive pre-interpreted. So marked out are the themes in this book that within minutes of finishing I felt ready to conduct a seminar. There is the problem of impermanent utopias. (Brook Farm is referred to, and Maryna's favorite role is plucky Rosalind from ''As You Like It,'' the saddest of comic heroines, who escapes to the forest of Arden and feels both free and banished from freedom.) There is the unexpected kinship between Poland and the United States, countries that have little in common except the fantasy that they have been singled out for a remarkable destiny -- America chosen to liberate the rest of the world, and Poland, after centuries of attacks and occupations, assigned a noble martyrdom. There is the paradox that Americans then as now were suspicious of art, preferring loud capitalist spectacles with junk food, and yet Shakespeare was so popular in the 19th century that even a rowdy town like Virginia City had a company of actors who knew his plays by heart. There is the way Maryna's abrupt change of roles stands for the changes ordinary 19th-century women may have wanted to make but couldn't. ''It is harder for a woman to want a life different from the one decreed for her,'' Maryna writes a friend back home, spelling out her predicament a little too explicitly. ''A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave prudently, amiably, timorously.'' And of course there is the classic Henry James problem turned inside out, with refined intellectuals set loose in vast, bumpkin America. Of all Sontag's themes, this is both the most lighthearted and the most labored. The observations she makes about America (it's a place that wants ''endlessly to be remade, to shuck off the expectations of the past, to start anew with a lighter burden'') have been made for centuries, rather forcefully, by many of our greatest writers, not to mention by Madonna. Nor is this the only instance where Sontag plays with imagery that is startlingly familiar. When the journalist first crosses the Atlantic, his boat trip matches to a T what you expect from the movies. Ditto the comic-relief character of Miss Collingridge, a sexless spinster diction coach who beseeches Maryna to say ''Idiot. Not eediot. And kill, not keel''; she could have been invented by James or Trollope, and played on film by a young Eve Arden. As for Maryna, with her aristocratic ennui, eroticized yet asexual glamour, cement-thick but enchanting accent and stardom lived as a kind of exile, it's hard not to be reminded of Garbo in ''Grand Hotel,'' tearfully pleading, ''I vant to be alone!'' Much of this d?j? vu may well be on purpose. Sontag was the great champion of camp, after all. Throughout her career she has been ravenously curious about all categories of aesthetic experience, and the stereotype is a perfectly legitimate, even fascinating category to explore. But if American culture can claim any particular virtue right now, surely it's a highly evolved, ironic awareness of many of the clich?s Sontag is describing as if for the first time. We have VH1 to tell us all about divas, and talk shows to remind us that we like to change identities at the drop of a hat. And didn't Sontag raise the stakes slightly higher in that opening chapter, when she said, essentially, Here is what my imagination is capable of; here is what I have been able to see? The irony is that Sontag's mind has such a rigorous, dauntingly original reputation; her thoughts, it is generally assumed, run on ahead of her sometimes dry prose. Maybe elsewhere but not here. Sentence by sentence, scene to scene, the writing in ''In America'' is utterly nimble. It's the ideas, somehow, that lag behind. Sarah Kerr is a writer on culture and politics. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-america.html 'Illness as Metaphor' July 16, 1978 Reviewed by DENIS DONOGHUE Illness as Metaphor" first appeared as three long essays in the New York Review of Books last January and February. The essays have been revised in a spirit of discretion. Wilhelm Reich's language is no longer described as having "its own inimitable looniness"; now it has "its own inimitable coherence." Laetrile is a "dangerous nostrum" rather than a "quack cure." John Dean is not reported as calling Watergate "the cancer on the Presidency." The revised version has him explaining Watergate to Nixon: "We have a cancer within -- close to the Presidency -- that's growing." Far-right groups no longer have "a paranoid view of the world"; now they have a "politics of paranoia." All the textual changes I have come across serve the cause of moderation. But Susan Sontag is still angry. Her book is not about illness, but about the use of illness as a figure or metaphor. She is particularly concerned with the metaphorical sue of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th. Most of these metaphors are lurid, and they turn each disease into a mythology. Until 1882, when tuberculosis was discovered to be a bacterial infection, the symptoms were regarded as constituting not merely a disease but a stage of being, a mystery of nature. Those who suffered from the disease were thought to embody a special type of humanity. The corresponding typology featured not bodily symptoms but spiritual and moral attributes: nobility of soul, creative fire, the melancholy of Romanticism, desire and its excess. Today, if Miss Sontag's account is accurate, there is a corresponding stereotype of the cancer victim: someone emotionally inert, a loser, slow, bourgeois, someone who has steadily repressed his natural feelings, especially of rage. Such a person is thought to be cancer-prone. Most of Miss Sontag's evidence for attitudes about tuberculosis is taken from 19th-century novels and operas. Evidence for attitudes about cancer is rarely cited at all, except from wild men like Reich and George Groddeck. At one point Miss Sontag says that "there is peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else" and that these explanations are popular because psychology is "a sublimated spiritualism," "a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of 'spirit' over matter." But she does not produce any respectable evidence for these assertions. If a doctor gave me a psychological stereotype instead of a cure or an alleviation, I'd demand my money back. If doctors have nothing better to say than that you have cancer because you are the type of person to get cancer, then indeed they should keep quiet. But because they don't know what causes cancer, their offense is venial if they hazard a guess. Miss Sontag says that the most truthful way for regarding illness is the one most purified of metaphoric thinking. A disease should be regarded as a disease, not as a sign of some terrible law of nature or an otherwise unnamable evil. I agree with her. But anger drives her to the point of asserting that "our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our reckless improvident responses to our real 'problems of growth,' for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent course of history." Very little evidence is produced that would sustain this list of charges. The gross mythology of tuberculosis did not persist after the discovery of streptomycin in 1944 and the introduction isoniazid in 1952. I cannot believe that the sinister mythology of cancer will persist after the causes of the disease are known and a successful treatment is produces. It is appalling that the disease retains its secret. So long as it dies, the secret is likely to turn itself into a mystery and to stand for nameless evils of every kind. In the meantime we should be alert to our attitudes and to our words. Miss Sontag's book is bound to help in this respect, even though it is short of evidence. "As long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have." I'm sure that's true, though I'm not convinced that many cancer patients are encouraged or forced to think of their disease in that way. What they fear is not an evil, invincible predator, but the terrible probability that their disease will result in death. If the metaphorical use of cancer discouraged doctors from trying to discover its cause and its cure, the situation would indeed be obscene, but there is no evidence that this is the case. Still, we are careless in our language. Miss Sontag is right in that charge. But she is not innocent in her practice. She confesses that once, in despair over America's war on Vietnam, she wrote that "the white race is the cancer of human history." That is the kind of statement she would now repudiate, not for its political sentiment but for its recourse to the metaphor of cancer. In the last chapter of her book she comments on the fact that the same vocabulary is used in reference to cancer, aerial warfare and science fiction. Cancer cells invade the body, patients are bombarded with toxic rays, chemotherapy is chemical warfare: the enemy is a nameless Other to be conquered and destroyed. Tumors are malignant or benign. And so on. "The use of cancer in political discourse," Miss Sontag maintains, "encourages fatalism and justifies 'severe' measures -- as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal." Miss Sontag is sensitive to this issue partly, I think, because she knows that her own rhetoric has often been guilty. Her victims have mostly been literary critic, so they have not deserved better treatment, but the habit of mind in her sentences has regularly been punitive. In the first pages of "Against Interpretation," for instance, she wrote that "like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities." The works of Beckett, she went on, have "attracted interpreters like leeches." A few pages later she wrote of "the infestation of art by interpretations." "Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us," she continued, "superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses." And the first sentence of her review of Sartre's "Saint Genet" reports that it is "a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of vicious solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness." If any other critic were to write that sentence, Miss Sontag would italicize "cancer," "grotesquely" and "ghastly" and accuse him of having an obscene mind. None of these sentences represents Miss Sontag at her best. At her best she is tough but fair. I have found "Illness as Metaphor" a disturbing book. I have read it three times, and I still find her accusations unproved. But the book has some extraordinarily perceptive things about our attitudes: how we view insanity, for instance, of heart disease. Nearly everything she writes demands to be qualified, but that demand is rarely met: she silences it before it has a chance to utter itself. I think her mind is powerful rather than subtle; it is impatient with nuances that ask to be heard, with minute discriminations that, if entertained, would impede the march of her argument. She is happiest when attacking a prejudice or a superstition or whatever she deems to be such, some force at large in the world that doesn't deserve the qualification that a more scrupulous mind would feel obliged to propose. She had the mind of a person who wants results and wants them now. So the elective affinity between her mind and its object is explained by the fact that each is present in the world as a form of power. To Miss Sontag, writing is combat. If I wanted to see a fine discrimination made, with precisely the right degree of allowance for and against, I wouldn't ask Miss Sontag to supply it. She would be bored by the request. But if I badly wanted to win, at nearly any cost, I would do anything to have Miss Sontag on my side. As in "Against Interpretation," "Styles of Radical Will," "Trip to Hanoi" and now "Illness as Metaphor," she would use lurid metaphors to fight lurid metaphors, believing that a good end justifies any means, any language, any style. It is my impression that "Illness as Metaphor" is a deeply personal book pretending for the sake of decency to be a thesis. As an argument, it seems to me strident, unconvincing as it stands, a prosecutor's brief that admits nothing in defense or mitigation. The brief is too brief to be just. So the reader is left with a case not fully made but points acutely established; enough, at any rate, to make him feel not only that he must in future watch his language but, with the same vigilance, watch his attitudes, prejudices, spontaneities. Denis Donoghue is professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin. His most recent book is "The Sovereign Ghost." He will teach at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York next fall. http://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/16/books/booksspecial/sontag-illness.html 'On Photography' December 18, 1977 Reviewed by WILLIAM H. GASS Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable, the anonymous narrator of one of Borges's apocalyptic tales tells us, because they multiply and disseminate an already illusory universe; and if this opinion is, as seems likely, surely true, then what of the most promiscuous and sensually primitive of all our gadgets -- the camera -- which copulates with the world merely by widening its eye, and thus so simply fertilized, divided itself as quietly as amoebas do, and with a gentle buzz slides its newborn image into view on a coated tongue? No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting. I can only try, here, to provide kid of dissolute echo of her words. The hollow sounds are all my own. Susan Sontag not only has made films -- and written critical essays ("Notes on Camp," "Against Interpretation") and fiction -- she also has a passionate interest in the Nikon's resonant echo or the Brownie's little print, as this beautiful book attests. Every page of "On Photography" raises important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them in the best way. In a context of clarity, skepticism and passionate concern, with an energy that never weakens but never blusters, and with an admirable pungency of thought and directness of expression that sacrifices nothing of sublety or refinement, Sontag encourages the reader's cooperation in her enterprise. Though disagreement at some point is certain, and every notion naturally needs refinement, every hypothesis support, every alleged connection further oil, the book understands exactly the locale and the level of its argument. Each issue is severed at precisely the right point, nothing left too short or let go on too long. So her book has, as we say, a good head: well cut, perfectly coiffed, uniform or complete in tone of color, with touches of intelligence so numerous they create a picture of photography the way those grains of gray compose the print. Sontag's comments on the work of Diane Arbus are particularly apt and beautifully orchestrated, as she raises the level of our appreciation and understanding of these strange photographs each time, in the course of her exposition, she has occasion to remark upon them. But these six elegant and carefully connected essays are not really about individual photographers, nor solely about the art, but rather about the act of photography at large, the plethora of the product, the puzzles of its nature. Principal among these problems is the fact that "the line between 'amateur' and 'professional,' 'primitive' and 'sophisticated' is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting -- it has little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography's characteristic powers as Stieglitz or a Walker Evans." Technical finish is not a measure. Intention scarcely maters. The subject alone signs no guarantee. I once took a terribly overexposed photograph of a Spanish olive grove, but if you thought I had intended the result, you could admire the interplay of the trees' washed-out form, the heat that seems to sweep through the grove like the wind. The fact is that, although there are many calculations which can be made before any photograph is taken, and of course tricks can be played during the developing afterward the real work is executed in a single click. A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. The decisions a photographer must make, compared to those of the flower-arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. The effects of his actions are dominated by accident: the ambiance of an instant in the camera's apprehension of the world. The formal properties of photographs, even the most formal ones, are too often exhausted in a glance, and we return to the subject, again and again, with other than esthetic interest. So far, certainly, the artistic importance of the camera has been secondary to its effect on society, on our knowledge of processes like aging, of things and beings (like the body of the opposite sex), on our standards of illustration an documentation, our ability to influence others with its powerful rhetoric, its untiring surveillance. It has changed the composition of our amusements and pastimes beyond return, altered our attitudes toward seeing itself. One realizes, reading Susan Sontag's book, that the image has done more than smother or mask or multiply its object. My face is only photography, and people inspect me to see if I resemble it. The family album demonstrates to me what I don't yet feel: not that I was young once, but that I'm old now. Time, so long as it lingers in the look, is visible to us in this photographic age in a way it was never visible before, among familiar things, we fail to measure change with any accuracy; but the camera records one step upon the stone, and then another, until the foot has worn a hollow like a hand cupped to catch rain. Process has become perceptible in the still. And that is strange. For the still photograph is rarely of a still subject, although in slower days one was cautioned not to move; and the image the camera caught, and was made to cough up, was an image already stopped, seized, like the victims of Pompeii's lava, in the slow flow of the subject's will. We can easily see the difference now, because, out of the continuities of experience, the sitter (that was the word) selected the slice that was to stand for his or her life, the prettiest or most imposing self (although this itself took skill that few possess); whereas it is normally the camera that makes the choice these days, and we are encouraged to relax, to guard against being on our guard, as if the pose were merely that, and the candid camera, more likely to serve up a fairer, fuller share of us that our own decision would supply. Besides, ceremonies are another thing of the past, and a visit to the photographer is itself something to be photographed before it disappears like the Aborigines. What was once a black box with a backwards beard, a menacing presence, a merciless eye, has become as discreet as a quick peek, friendly as an old chum, ubiquitous as bees at a picnic or Japanese school children at a shrine. But camera enthusiasts are nor always fans of the photograph. There are too many benefits in the point and click itself. The business of taking a picture is, first of all, a flattering and righteous one, as Sontag points out, so the shooter is accorded considerable respect: If the subject, we are pleased to have been found "pictorial," worthy of homage or memorial; if a bystander, we do not wish so come between the lens and its love, so we stop or turn aside or otherwise absent our image. It is bad manners to block the view or be insensitive to the claims of the camera. We have learned to read resemblance as easily as English. A photograph is flat, reduced, rigidly rectangular like the view-finder, cropped out of space like a piece of grass, sliced from time like cheese or salami, fixed on a piece of transportable paper, soft or glossy as no perception is, often taken at artificial speeds, positions, distances, so we can "see" both shatters and implosions, the pale denizens of caves or the deep sea, the insides of minerals, as she says, crystals, sky, the speed of bees; and almost invariably, in the case of the serious camera, the photograph is composed wholly of shadow, its shades going from gray to gray like night or our moods in a state of depression; yet we breathe in its illusions like a heavy scent. Sontag omits none of these matters, touching on them frequently, each time in a more complex and complete way, though her method (exactly appropriate to the vastness of her subject, the untechnical level of her language, the literary nature of her form) allows only the brush, the mention, the intriguing suggestion. Given my own philosophical biases, I should have been pleased to see her weigh more heavily the highly conventional character of the simplest Polaroid. However, the belief in the realism of its image is fundamental to the cultural impact of the camera, and since that is an important part of her theme, she is right to stress it. Even if the camera were more like the eye than it is, and Sontag is both put off and beguiled by the parallels, it sits steady as the spider for the fly, sees only in a blink, and is sightless 99 percent of the time -- while we see between blinks as between Venetian blinds, and our sight is thus relatively uninterrupted, in a sense continuing even through our sleep. When we see, there is always the "I" as well as the eye. There is the frame of the eye socket, the fringe of hair, the feel of the face, our hungers, hopes and hates - that full and exuberant life in which objects seen are seen because they're sought, complained of, or encountered -- though no photograph contains them. And when we carry away from any experience a visual memory (remote, conventional, schematic in its own way, too ... no souvenir), that recollection is private, not public; it cannot be handed round for sniggers, smiles or admiration; it cannot lie a lifetime in a box to be discovered by distant cousins who will giggle at the quaintness of its clothing. No. I think that I would want to say that the camera only pretends to be an eye. It creates another object to be seen, yet one that exists quite differently than a perception; not merely differing as people differ who come from different climates and geography, but as entities differ which have their homes in different realms of Being. It is not sight the camera satisfies so thoroughly, but the mind; for it creates in a click a visual concept of its object, a sign whose substance seems seductively the same as its sense, yet whose artificiality is no less than the S's that line the sentence like nervous sparrows on a swaying wire. Sontag discusses, it seems to me, a number of separate, though not necessarily equal or even exclusive views of what the serious purpose of photography might be, apart from the immediate needs of sentiment and utility it so obviously serves. The camera certainly confers an identity on whatever it isolates, however arbitrary the framing. It permits its subject to speak to the world, in a way it would otherwise never be able to do, by multiplying its presence, taking it from its natural environment and placing it within the reach of many, as though it could live well anywhere, like the starling. The lens removes reality from reality better than a surgeon, and allows us to witness killing with impunity, nakedness without shame, weddings without weeping, miracles without astonishment, poverty without pain, death without anxiety. It discovers a desirable titillation in overlooked, humble, ugly, out-of-the-way or unlikely objects, often reflecting the interest of a social class in what the camera considers exotic. It can create an image that will interpret its object , so that the shot will not be a cartoon balloon fixed to something real, but a caption of commentary, like an epitaph, beneath. In addition, the camera finds forms in nature that are the same as those which establish beauty in the other arts, an thus proves that photography is itself an art -- an art of structural epiphany, if God has had a hand in the laws of Nature. The camera is a leveler. It makes everything photogenic. Every angle of an object has an interest, as has every object from any angle, every entrance, every exit, however odd or quick or small or previously proscribed. A scullery maid may make a better picture than a queen. And the eye is omnivorous as an army of army ants. The perfect cook, the camera can make anything, in a photograph as on a platter, look good. Of course, the camera may be registering exactly that relation of eye and apprehension which give the machine is particular epistemology. The image is magically superior to the word because, though a gray ghost, the photo is believed to possess actual properties of its object. Furthermore, the relation between image and object has been made by machine -- a device that lifts off a look with less wear than a rubbing -- yet what in the image is the same as its source? In a sense, what one catches in a photograph is reflected light, and film is like river sand that receives the imprint of the drinking deer, or mud that preserves the tire tread of a robber's car; but the causal connection is loose, and can be faked. Suppose, for instance, we contrived to dimple up an image, by artificial means, created the picture of a person who never existed (doctored photographs do that for events). The photo would still "look like" a man, but it would not be the image of anybody, and so (without its of) would not be an image. Would it any longer be a photograph? The great equalizer, the camera has brought democracy to the visual levels of the world. Now images accompany us everywhere, even attesting to our quite fragile and always dubious identity (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein: I am I because my shrunken photo shows me). Though only a hundred years old as an art, photography seems already ageless as a skill, its product without limit, even if its images are not immortal and do decay, and even if some species are endangered. Perhaps they move us too easily, as though we stood on skates. Perhaps, at the same time, we have grown too familiar with the way the camera makes our common clay seem strange. Now, not even strangeness is unfamiliar. Instead of text accompanied by photographs, Susan Sontag has appended to her book a collection of quotes, framed by punctuational space and the attribution of source. These are clipped from their context to create, through collage, another context -- yet more words. And for a book on photography that shall surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject, maybe there is a message, a moral, a lesson, in that. William H. Gass is the author of "Omensetter's Luck," "Fiction and the Figures of Life," "On Being Blue" and other books. He is professor of philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis. http://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-photo.html 'Against Interpretation' January 23, 1966 Reviewed by BENJAMIN DEMOTT The lady swings. She digs the Supremes and is savvy about Camp. She catches the major Happenings and the best of the kinky flicks. She likes her hair wild and her sentences intense ("I couldn't bear what I had written," etc.; "I could not stand the omnipotent author," etc.). She mocks Establishment biggies (Charles Snow, Arthur Miller) and worships little mag kings (Genet, Resnais, Artaud, that whole unruddy gang). And time and time over she flaunts intellectual pieties, as with her hint that critical problems are like Kleenex and the mind is a runny nose. ("I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, solved ... problems as of having used them up.") Yet despite all this, despite coterie ties, clever girlisms, a not completely touching softness toward the cant of the Edie & Andy world the author of the collection of essays and reviews at hand stands forth as a genuine discovery. Her book, which includes 26 pieces published between 1961 and 1965 in periodicals ranging from Partisan Review to Film Quarterly, is a vivid bit of living history here and now, and at the end of the sixties it may well rank among the invaluable cultural chronicles of these years. That this is so owes much to the alertness and integrity with which Susan Sontag details her own responses to the more startling and symptomatic esthetic inventions of recent days. These inventions don't figure, to be sure, in every piece assembled here. A substantial portion of this book is about other books -- plain, ordinary, print-and-paper works of Pavese, Sartre, Simone Weil, Leiris, Lukacs, Levi-Strauss. What is more, the critical argument patched on as a unifying line, in introductory and concluding essays, appears to derive less directly from experience with new-wave films, pop art and the like, than from overexposure to certain fringe movements of literary criticism. And, as has to be added, that argument isn't especially fresh or well-informed. Miss Sontag's announced cause is that of design, the surface art in the Jamesian sense in fine, the cause of style. She invokes a (predictable) string of sages from Ortega y Gasset to Marshall McLuhan in support of the claim that "interpreters" -- people who "translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" -- are philistines. And, impatient with theorists who continue to treat novels and movies as means of "depicting and commenting on secular reality," she insists that art now is "a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility." One weakness of the case, in the present version, is it rather beamish dependence on crude distinctions between form and content. Another is that it lacks urgency. The author believes her sort of thinking is out of favor and that lit-crit generally in the last few decades has avoided matters of structure and style. She is wrong by a country mile on this point, and the embattled sections of her book seem, in consequence, more like tomboy fantasies than reactions to critical things as they are. Competent chatterers about critical things as they are, though, aren't in short supply these days. What is rare is the writer who has moved beyond the Gee Whiz or See Here response to the new art the observer who breathes naturally in encounters with a Godard film or a nouveau roman and takes as his critical purpose the re-creation of these encounters as known an experienced by the feelings and the imagination. Miss Sontag at her best is such a writer. She doesn't simply view a Happening, for instance; she inhabits the moment of its "performance" and gives it back to her reader as an inward disturbance as well as a set of odd outward events. We, the audience, feel "teased" and "abused," she reports. Nobody caters to our desire to see everything, events occur in semidarkness or simultaneously in different rooms, we are "deliberately frustrated," "enveloped," mocked, turned into scapegoats: "I, and other people in the audience, often laugh during Happenings. I don't think this is simply because we are embarrassed or made nervous by violent and absurd actions. I think we laugh because what goes on in the Happenings is, in the deepest sense, funny. This does not make it any less terrifying. There is something that moves one to laughter ... in the most terrible of modern catastrophes and atrocities. There is something comic in modern experience as such, a demonic, not a divine comedy." As every schoolboy knows, no critic can recover and re-create an esthetic experience in its wholeness. Formulas and summarizing ploys inevitably turn up in "Against Interpretation" -- the key words and phrases are: "mixtures of attitude," "contradiction" and "radical juxtaposition." And in a few sections there is laziness and fudging. Miss Sontag notes that "Pop art lets in wonderful and new mixtures of attitude which would before have seemed contradictions" but analyzes the mixtures too sketchily and doesn't specify the quality of the relevant feelings. Her patience now and again fails her: she calls up the weird images in Jack Smith's film "Flaming Creatures," claims the film is "a brilliant spoof on sex" that is also "full of the lyricism of the erotic impulse" -- but races away with too few words about how this simultaneity of lyric and satiric modes feels on the pulses. And, since a good deal of the book consists of reviews, the best work of the artist under consideration is sometimes scanted. (A piece about Nathalie Sarraute focuses for most of its length on this writer's fictional manifesto and deals only dryly, in a paragraph, with her novels.) But the final impression, to repeat, is by no means that of perfunctory writing. Miss Sontag drives herself hard, more often than not, in the interest of adequacy of response. Her passing remarks on figures as dissimilar as Taylor Mead, Tammy Grimes, the Beatles and Harpo Marx are alive with a sense of what it is like to watch these performers. Her descriptions of the sensations and feelings engaged or disengaged during Brecht plays, good and bad Ionesco, Peter Weiss's "Marat-Sade," and the films of Bresson and Godard are at once subtle and exact. And there are moments at which, pressing toward a perception of the kinds of feeling articulated in a particular esthetic taste, she rises to analysis that is nothing less than exhilaratingly shrewd -- witness the swift, unpretentious, deliciously comprehending remarks on "sweet cynicism" and "tenderness" in her famous "Notes on Camp." More piquant than any of this, there is at every moment the achieved character of the observer herself. He "I" of "Against Interpretation" isn't a mere pallid, neutral register; it is a self clear enough in outline to provide answers to many of the cultural historian's bald questions -- as, for example, the question who needs the new art and why? Spiky, jealous of her preferences, seemingly exacerbate by the very notion that others may share them, Miss Sontag obliquely confirms that enthusiasts of the new art tend to be people who need badge of difference from the herd. Impatient, restless, her nerve ends visible in sentence after sentence (can't bear it, can't stand it), she further testifies that one pleasure offered by the new art is a release from that prison of patience and ploddingness into which traditional art locks its audience. Finally: suspicious of order, certain beyond doubt that sanity itself is but a cozy lie, she reveals that the new art is, most profoundly, a mode of self-torment -- a means by which guilty men who know the real truth of existence (life is meaningless) can punish themselves for finkishly ignoring it and dallying day by day with the comfortable old deceits of good sense. To make this last point, is, of course, to say that a thoroughly American figure stands at the center of "Against Interpretation." The dress is new, true enough, and the images strange. The haunting image is that of a lady of intelligence and apparent beauty hastening along city streets at the violet hour, nervous, knowing, strained, excruciated (as she says) by self-consciousness, bound for the incomprehensible cinema, or for the concert hall where non-music is non-played, or for the loft where cherry bombs explode in her face and flour sacks are flapped close to her, where her ears are filled with mumbling, senseless sound and she is teased, abused, enveloped, deliberately frustrated until -- Until we, her audience, make out suddenly that this scene is, simply, hell, and that the figure in it (but naturally) is old-shoe-American: a pilgrim come again, a flagellant, one more Self-lacerating Puritan. A few readers, mainly swingers, will be vexed by the discovery of this "radical juxtaposition," for it does rather mock the gospel of "liberation." But most readers will acknowledge, at the least, that to have brought such a complex figure to life in a collection of essays is a feat. Miss Sontag has written a ponderable, vivacious, beautifully living and quite astonishingly American book. Mr. DeMott, the author of "Hells and Benefits," is professor of English at Amherst. Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feeling through the route of the intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection. Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. but its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. -- From "Against Interpretation." http://www.nytimes.com/1966/01/23/books/booksspecial/sontag-interpretati on.html? 'The Volcano Lover: A Romance' August 9, 1992 Reviewed by JOHN BANVILLE At a literary festival some years ago, the critic George Steiner expressed his impatience at the arrogance of poets and novelists, most of whom, it seemed to him, believe that theirs are the only areas of literature in which a writer can be truly creative. For his part, he declared, he would happily swap any number of second-rate sonnets for one page of Claude Levi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," and whole shelves full of indifferent novels for a single chapter of Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams." His remarks aroused anger and vituperation, of course, yet many in the audience thought he had a point. That point, however, loses some of its acuity when one recalls that Mr. Steiner has committed fiction of his own -- three books of it, in fact. Would he exchange his first volume of tales, "Anno Domini," for a page of his "Language and Silence"? Perhaps he would; yet it seems that even the profoundest critics are not content merely to criticize fiction, but itch also to produce the stuff. "The Volcano Lover" is a surprise. A historical novel by Susan Sontag? And a historical novel that declares itself (shamelessly, one almost wants to say) to be a romance, at that? Who would have thought it? Although she has written fiction in the past, Ms. Sontag is best known as a critic who for the last 30 years has been one of the leaders of the avant-garde in the United States, the American champion and interpreter of such quintessentially European figures as Roland Barthes and E. M. Cioran. Surely the author of that seminal essay "Against Interpretation" would look with nothing but scorn upon a modern-day attempt to produce something worthwhile in such a tired old genre as the historical novel? Well, not a bit of it. "The Volcano Lover," despite a few nods of acknowledgment toward post-modernist self-awareness, is a big, old-fashioned broth of a book. Sir Walter Scott would surely have approved of it; in fact, he would probably have enjoyed it immensely. THE "volcano lover" of the title is Sir William Hamilton, the British diplomat and antiquary who is best remembered as the complaisant husband of Emma Hamilton, notorious mistress of Admiral Nelson. The book is set for the most part in Naples, where, from 1764 until his recall under a cloud in 1800, Sir William was the British envoy to the court of the egregious Bourbon monarch Ferdinand IV, later to become Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, and his formidable Austrian wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. The novel is a kind of triptych, divided among Hamilton, his wife and Lord Nelson. Ms. Sontag presents her characters in a way that is at once stylized and intimate; they might be figures from an old ballad, or even from the tarot pack. Thus Sir William is referred to throughout by his Italian sobriquet of "Cavaliere," Emma is "the Cavaliere's wife" and Nelson, of course, is "the hero." This is an effective means of escaping the difficulty all writers of historical novels face in presenting famous, often legendary, people from the past as plausible characters in a work of fiction. ("I say, Brahms, isn't that old Beethoven over there?") The novel opens with a prologue that invites us to accompany the author on a visit to the flea market of history: "Why enter? What do you expect to see? I'm seeing. I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left." Some readers may quail at this self-conscious and rather ponderous opening; Ms. Sontag, however, has set her aim on a broad audience, and very rapidly -- indeed, at the turn of a page -- we find ourselves set down squarely in a solid and recognizable world: "It is the end of a picture auction. London, autumn of 1772." Here we meet the Cavaliere, and at once some of the main themes of the book are subtly sketched. He has tried and failed to sell a thing he loves dearly, a "Venus Disarming Cupid" by Correggio. "Having stopped loving it in order to sell it," he tells his nephew, "I can't enjoy it in the same way, but if I am unable to sell it I do want to love it again." Throughout her novel, the author will return repeatedly to the dichotomies of love and money, art and value, possession and renunciation. The Cavaliere is a cold fish, but he has two grand passions. The first is his collection of art and artifacts, the second is volcanoes, and in particular Mount Vesuvius, which, thanks to his posting to Naples, he has ample opportunity to study. It is a measure of Ms. Sontag's skill and artistic tact that she does not labor the contrasts between the calmness and frailty of man-made treasures and the unpredictability and chaotic forcefulness of nature, while yet managing to keep this theme firmly in view throughout. In the love that erupts between Emma and Lord Nelson, the Cavaliere encounters another of those natural phenomena that he can only observe, never experience. The first hundred pages or so constitute a portrait of the Cavaliere and his world, and although in her central character it might seem the author is working with poor material, this is, I think, the richest and most convincingly detailed section of the book. When Emma, and then Nelson, come on the scene, the perspective broadens, with a consequent loss of depth. Particularly good is the portrayal of the Cavaliere's first wife, Catherine, a Welsh heiress, refined, delicate, unhappy and hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with her husband. After Catherine, who has always been frail, dies from what the doctor diagnoses as "a paralysis," the Cavaliere's nephew, Charles Greville, sends his mistress to Naples. She presents herself as a widow, Mrs. Hart, but she is really the impossibly beautiful daughter of a village blacksmith "who had come to London at 14 as an underhousemaid, was seduced by the son of the house" and "soon found more dubious employment." Although Emma does not know it, the cynical Charles has "sold" her to his uncle in return for an indefinite loan to pay his debts. "So the old man collected the young woman," becoming "a kind of Pygmalion in reverse, turning his Fair One into a statue." EMMA HAMILTON is a splendid character, and Ms. Sontag does her proud. She catches Emma's gaiety, her cheerful vulgarity, her selfishness, her love of life, her cruelty. Nelson, too, is portrayed with vividness and subtle skill. The author brings a skeptical sensibility to bear on their grand passion, yet shows us too how lovers delude and sustain themselves with fictions that are not only necessary but also plausible. Emma was a rose, though somewhat overblown by the time Nelson met her. And he was a hero, though also a martinet, a muddler and a merciless tyrant, as Ms. Sontag shows when Ferdinand and his vengeful consort send the British admiral to deal with the rebellious nobility of Naples after the fall of its short-lived republic in 1799. The novel closes with the posthumous testament of Eleonora Pimentel, one of the leaders of the republican movement, an enlightened thinker and minor poet who was one of the many important figures of Neapolitan society whom Nelson summarily executed for their part in the rebellion. On a visit to Naples, Goethe (referred to, of course, as "the poet") tells Emma: "The great end of art is to strike the imagination. . . . And, in pursuing the true grandeur of design, it may sometimes be necessary for the artist to deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth." In this is detectable, I suspect, the voice of Ms. Sontag herself. And yet, another of the perils of this kind of fiction is the tendency of the author to become hypnotized by facts, to let them weigh down the narrative. In places, "The Volcano Lover" does become somewhat dropsical, swollen with the accumulation of historical evidence (no sources are cited, however), but for the most part it proceeds with an admirable lightness of step. There is an operatic quality to the tale (Baron Scarpia makes frequent, villainous appearances), and a grand, at times majestic, sweep to the telling. The style is confident, vigorous, witty. ("Ah, these English," reflects Goethe. "So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would have ever invented them.") And, for the most part, the narrative is irresistible in its forward thrust. Some of the set pieces are worthy of a Marguerite Yourcenar or a Simon Schama, and there are wonderful touches of grotesque comedy. When, for example, the ship carrying the Cavaliere's precious collection of antique vases begins to sink, the sailors save what they believe is one of his treasure chests, which turns out to contain the corpse of a British naval officer -- an admiral, as playful fate would have it -- pickled in alcohol, being brought home for burial. I find "The Volcano Lover" impressive, at times enchanting, always interesting, always entertaining; yet it also seems to me curiously hollow. I wish I could like it less and admire it more. What is missing is the obsessiveness of art, that leporine, glazed gaze that confronts us from out of the pages of many a less densely textured but altogether more concentrated work. Will it seem cantankerous in the extreme if I say that Ms. Sontag cares too much? Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at the heart. For all the author's evenhandedness, we sense clearly behind her studied fiction a passionate moral intelligence hard at work; this is to Ms. Sontag's great personal credit, of course, but peculiarly damaging to her art. But then perhaps she did not set out to write a work of pure fictional art. In its almost encyclopedic discursiveness, "The Volcano Lover" displays -- intentionally, I am sure -- the influence of the 18th-century French philosophe , in particular Denis Diderot. It operates in that broad but nebulous area between fiction and essay, in which Hermann Broch's "Death of Virgil" is the supreme exemplar, and which in our time is occupied by writers such as Milan Kundera and V. S. Naipaul. However, what will stay with me from "The Volcano Lover" are those moments when the author forgets about the broad facts of history and homes in on this or that detail of her grand pageant, letting her imagination have full and formidable play. When the doings of heroine, hero, king and poet have faded from my memory, I shall still have a clear and precise picture of the Cavaliere's pet monkey, Jack: "The monkey put his paw on the Cavaliere's wig and uttered a small cry. He patted the wig, then inspected his black palm, tensing and unfurling it." It is in such seemingly unconsidered corners of the novel that art resides. SEE NAPLES AND GAPE He lives in a place that for sheer volume of curiosities -- historical, natural, social -- could hardly be surpassed. It was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural disaster and it had the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava and, some miles away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two dead cities. . . . Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called conversazioni , which often did not break up until dawn. On the streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes and fruit, whose dismantling by the ravenous mob . . . was applauded by the overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of 1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of bread. The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year. The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the silver that they had hidden in convents. . . . The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and honeysuckle . . . instead of corpses. . . . Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle. . . . Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed, committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive mentally. >From "The Volcano Lover." http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/09/books/booksspecial/sontag-volcano.html 'AIDS and Its Metaphors' January 22, 1989 Reviewed by PAUL ROBINSON Susan Sontag's purpose in ''AIDS and Its Metaphors'' is to show how the way we talk and think about AIDS makes the disease even worse than it actually is. The metaphorical packaging of AIDS, she argues, increases the suffering of the afflicted while creating unneeded anxiety among the population at large. Readers familiar with Ms. Sontag's ''Illness as Metaphor'' (1978) will recognize a familiar intellectual tactic. In that work she directed her critical skills at the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th, revealing how language distorted the reality of both diseases and, in the case of cancer at least, kept patients from pursuing the most rational course of treatment. With AIDS, she sees the metaphorical process at work even in the way the disease is defined. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, she points out, is above all a disease of stages. ''Full-fledged'' or ''full-blown'' AIDS, said to be invariably fatal, is preceded by infection by HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, and AIDS-related complex (ARC). The metaphor at work is a botanical or zoological one. It insinuates that the evolution from the original infection to AIDS is a biological inevitability; the stages stand in relation to one another as acorn to oak tree. The effects of this linguistic sleight of hand is to create the impression that not only AIDS but HIV infection leads inexorably to death. It is an invitation to despair, causing much misery in its own right and also diverting victims from a sensible medical attitude toward their condition. Virtually alone, Ms. Sontag hopes to combat the fatalism associated with AIDS. She will not allow that the disease, even in its mature form, invariably results in death: ''It is simply too early to conclude, of a disease identified only seven years ago, that infection will always produce something to die from, or even that everybody who has what is defined as AIDS will die of it.'' The high mortality rate, she speculates, could simply reflect the early, generally quick deaths of those most vulnerable to the virus. Above all, however, she resists the illicit deduction that HIV infection, as the metaphor implies, is just as lethal as the final manifestations of the disease. Currently the authorities estimate that between 30 and 35 percent of those testing HIV positive will develop AIDS within five years, and they further hedge their bets by suggesting that over a longer stretch of time most or probably all of those infected will fall ill. For Ms. Sontag this is metaphorical double talk, an insidious apology for medical failure. One wonders whether Ms. Sontag hasn't allowed her experience with cancer to color her interpretation of the present epidemic. She was herself a cancer patient in the 1970's, and she triumphed over not only the disease but her doctors' ''gloomy prognosis'' as well. AIDS, however, differs from cancer in one striking respect: there has not been a single known case of recovery. Given this awesome fact, the bleak view of AIDS implied in its conceptualization as a disease of stages seems less a metaphorical trick than a sober assessment of reality. Likewise, the suspicion that HIV infection may in the long run prove 100 percent fatal reflects the sober fact that we have seen that figure rise from well under 10 percent to over 30 percent in the period the disease has been under observation. A measure of fatalism seems altogether in order. A second metaphor Ms. Sontag wishes to exorcise is the notion of AIDS as a ''plague'' (in contrast to an ''epidemic,'' the neutral term she prefers). Her principal objection to the plague metaphor is that it represents the disease as a punishment, a ''visitation'' inflicted not only on the ill but on society at large. The punishment, of course, is for moral laxity - a view supported by the disease's association with homosexual license and illegal drugs, although contradicted by the absence of either of these connections with the disease in Africa. The plague image is also regrettable, in her view, because, like the botanical or zoological metaphor of stages, it contributes to the aura of inevitability: ''The plague metaphor is an essential vehicle of the most pessimistic reading of the epidemiological prospects. From classic fiction to the latest journalism, the standard plague story is of inexorability, inescapability.'' Curiously, some of the epidemic's most sympathetic and profound chroniclers have self-consciously employed the language of plague to very different moral effect. Particularly striking in this regard is Andrew Holleran, some of whose columns in the magazine Christopher Street have recently been published in book form as ''Ground Zero.'' In Mr. Holleran's eloquent usage, ''the plague'' conveys not only the physical agony of the disease itself, but the reverberant sense of catastrophe and reasonable despair the epidemic has unleashed. The word also suggests something of its character as an ironic atavism. It remains a metaphor, to be sure, but an appropriate one. Ms. Sontag also objects to the idea that AIDS is somehow particularly dehumanizing or degrading. She observes that these characterizations are invariably applied to diseases that transform the body, especially the face. AIDS (notably when it results in Kaposi's sarcoma) is similar in this respect to syphilis or leprosy. The judgment is merely esthetic, in Ms. Sontag's view, and adds an illegitimate psychic burden to the patient's physical sufferings. She seems not overly impressed that, alone among epidemics, AIDS typically seeks out its victims in their prime, at the moment when physical attractiveness is most integral to one's sense of self. Indeed, for homosexuals this ''esthetic'' concern is far from arbitrary: not only is the disease hideously disfiguring, but it originates in a moment of erotic attraction, when physical beauty is very much to the point. The supremely ironic structure of the disease - one readily thinks of Blake's ''Sick Rose'' - makes its ''metaphorical'' association with dehumanization, once again, seem entirely appropriate. As Ms. Sontag admits, ''one cannot think without metaphors,'' so the correct question to ask regarding the way we think about AIDS is whether its metaphors are well or ill chosen. They would be ill chosen if they misrepresented the disease or contributed to its victims' pain. Despite her ingenuity and her manifest good will, Ms. Sontag doesn't convince me that either is the case. By comparison with earlier diseases, the metaphors associated with AIDS have tended to be both tame and apposite. The disease itself, and not the way we talk about it, is the true source of its horror. Paul Robinson, a professor of history at Stanford University, is the author of ''The Modernization of Sex.'' http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/22/books/booksspecial/sontag-aids.html --------------------------------- 'Under the Sign of Saturn' November 23, 1980 Reviewed by DAVID BROMWICH Susan Sontag's third book of essays has meditations on Antonin Artaud, Elias Canetti, Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Benjamin and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's film about Hitler, along with brief eulogies for Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes. Her subjects bear witness to Miss Sontag's range as well as her diligence. She keeps up - appears, at times, to do the keeping-up for a whole generation - and has long been an effective publicist for the more imposing European offshoots of high modernism. The theater of cruelty, the death of ''the author'': From ground to summit, from oblivion to oblivion, she covers the big movements and ideas and then sends out her report, not without qualms. For the art she most admires, an inward and recalcitrant art, exists in tension with her own role as its advocate. It stands outside the mainstream of culture, and sometimes at the very periphery of human experience: It refuses to belong. Nevertheless, Miss Sontag tries to help it belong, by explaining it to us in calm, reasonable, sympathetic tones. Her job is to spread the avant-garde word with evangelical warmth. But what if the word was a curse? To repeat it too complacently may lead to ''the domestication of agony.'' The phrase is Miss Sontag's, and she is troubled by it. Yet for her there seems to b e no way out of the predicament it describes. Her fondness for the extreme case inclines her to believe that the extreme case must somehow be ''exemplary'' (a favorite praise-word). To be exemplary it must first be widely known, and here Miss Sontag faces a dilemma. She can either do justice to the subtlety of the thinker in question and increase his following by a very few; or reduce him to manageable slogans and greatly increase the frequency with which his name occurs in the intellectual chatter of the age. She has chosen the latter course. Her message is always: ''Read these writers; but do not suppose that you can possess them.'' Yet one critic cannot argue both points with equal efficiency, and in reading Miss Sontag we are apt to forget the warning. Thus Benjamin's ferocity and Artaud's ''unassimilable voice'' are brought into line with our own readiness to benefit from what is fierce and unassimilable. By this route, dangerous ideas come to sound wonderfully acute or wonderfully daring and, of course, ahead of their time. Eventually they are domesticated. Miss Sontag's essay on Benjamin shows most plainly how this can happen, and it is worth a long look in any case. Benjamin - a German-Jewish essayist, celebrated as a commentator on Baudelaire and Kafka, who committed suicide in 1940 when his escape from Nazi Europe seemed impossible - is both the greatest and the most dangerous of her subjects; she gets her title from his ''Saturnine'' temperament and writes of him with a brave though slightly strained familiarity. Benjamin composed some unsettling aphorisms on ''The Destructive Character,'' in which the note of self-reference is unmistakable. He sketched an attitude roughly comparable to that of Nietzsche's ''Critical Historian.'' For both writers, the cultural achievements of the past have become overwhelming and therefore oppressive; in the present, we are condemned merely to preserve or repeat them. Both writers go on to suggest an alternative: deliberate forgetfulness. Where the critical historian rewrites history to make room for himself, the destructive character adopts a wholly negative relation to the present. His life becomes one continuous act of destruction: ''What exists he reduces to rubble.'' But here is the way Miss Sontag interprets the same idea: ''The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.'' Who would not wish to see those things destroyed? Benjamin, however, when he said destruction meant destruction, without any dash followed by a limiting clause. It is an uncompromising credo, and has had consequences for those who stuck by it. One cannot be sure which of the available forms of intellectual terrorism Benjamin himself might have encouraged in the hope of clearing the air. But we have at least a clue in the admiration he professed for Brecht during the most intolerant Stalinist phase of Brecht's career. Even more temperate, assured and remote from Benjamin is her interpretation of his belief in a hidden self. For this, Miss Sontag is indebted to Gershom Scholem's essay ''Walt er Benjamin and His Angel,'' which she alludes to but never names . She thinks that for Benjamin, ''the process of building a self and its works is always too slow.'' But in the writings she has in mind, Benjamin seems to have denied that the self could be ''built'' at all. For the self, as Benjamin conceived it, does not belong to the world of ordinary experience; it does not learn from or even participate in our daily lives. The part of us that is engaged with the world grows up separate from the self, and we live in the unhappy awareness that this exile from the self makes our existence unintelligible. Benjamin spoke in apocalyptic language about the day when this hidden self would return to bless him: It would be the day of judgment. That is why he announced his intention not to build but to wait, and said of his attitude toward the self, ''nothing can overcome my patience.'' His distinction between two realms - a hidden realm of complete knowledge and a fallen realm of existence - and his argument for destruction as a weapon to break the tyranny of an existence that seems a kind of exile, both have points in common with Gnostic religious doctrine. Elsewhere, in her essay on Artaud, Miss Sontag describes Gnosticism as ''a sensibility,'' and by doing so goes some way toward domesticating it. About the dates and places of Benjamin's career, Miss Sontag is oddly precise. Oddly, because they are given in no special order; a beginner could not use them to reconstruct even the broad outlines of the life. Their real importance for Miss Sontag seems to be magical rather than expository. But her largest difficulty, and this holds for many of the essays, is a certain vagueness in her conception of her reader. She seems to be addressing a reader who knows Benjamin's writings so well that he can pick up glancing allusions to a dozen titles, but who needs to be told that Scholem and Theodor Adorno were his friends, that ''what the French call un triste'' is a person marked by ''a profound sadness.'' ''Approaching Artaud,'' the longest essay in the book, originally appeared as the introduction to a selection of Artaud's writings. Miss Sontag has a gift for sympathy but none at all for quotation, and with Artaud the balance works very much to her advantage. He took a passion for literature, and a resentment of literature, as far as it could go, and ended in the sort of madness that makes better reading in French than in English. Even here, for all her caution, Miss Sontag cannot help making the subject tamer than he sounds in his own words. But she offers a richly conscientious survey of Artaud's career, and adds a defense of madness in the familiar style of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault. The result may not convince anyone to read beyond ''The Theater and Its Double,'' which remains Artaud's best-known work; but the next generation of students, when they decide to approach him, will be using Miss Sontag's notes to ease the first rigors of contact. ''Fascinating Fascism,'' on the art of Leni Riefenstahl - the German movie star and Nazi movie director and, more recently, photographer of primitive African tribes - is written in a less friendly spirit. Here Miss Sontag wants to establish the reality of ''fascist art,'' and to expand that category beyond works called fascist simply because of their sponsorship or avowed aim. She names ''Fantasia,'' ''2001'' and Busby Berkeley's ''The Gang's All Here'' as examples of ''fascist art'' - an intriguing list, and one only wishes she would say something about it. ''Triumph of the Will,'' Riefenstahl's 1935 propaganda film of a Nuremberg rally, doubtless belongs in this company. Its chief apologists have been those who affirm the total separation of art from the political vision that it serves. But Miss Sontag once counted herself among them, and her essay is curiously indifferent to her own earlier position. At the end Riefenstahl is linked to the sadomasochistic ''scenario'' now available to everyone, and it is this that Miss Sontag denounces. She calls it, in an awkward but true enough phrase, an experience ''both violent and indirect, very mental.'' Yet her peroration spoils the effect by rhetorical overreach: ''The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.'' That slips into bathos because the freight is too heavy; but in any case the details of costume, which become an absorbing concern in the second part of Miss Sontag's attack, are beside the point. Black leather is a symptom and not a cause of the brutal estheticism she deplores. A better conclusion would have looked beyond the costumes and more deeply at the specialized emotions that they satisfy. But to do so might have led to a reappraisal of the ''camp'' sensibility, of which Miss Sontag was once an excited interpreter. About camp she now says only, ''art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today'' because ''taste is context, and the context has changed.'' And yet there were many who felt 10 years ago as she feels now. Is it possible that Miss Sontag has simply changed her mind and wishes at all costs to avoid saying so? After ''Fascinating Fascism'' many readers will supppose that she has indeed changed her mind. But in general, the extent of Miss Son tag's commitment to a language of sensibil ity, and of her willingness to revise it by stating a moral o bjection in moral terms,remains uncertain even to herself. Of Benjami n's experiments with hashish she observes, almost pertly: ''In fac t, melancholics make thebest addicts.'' So the moralist in her is fre e to depart without a trace. To make a strength of Miss Sontag's mixed qualities, it might be argued that her shifting point of view has fostered her catholicity of taste. There is probably no other writer who could feel attached to the ideas of Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes, and passionately inhabit both their worlds. For the rest of us, one would drive out the other: They are too different in tone, interest and specific density. Miss Sontag unites them, and seems all the luckier for it. Incidentally, the eulogy for Goodman also gives us our clearest picture of her: ''I am writing this in a tiny room in Paris, sitting on a wicker chair at a typing table in front of a window which looks onto a garden; at my back is a cot and a night table; on the floor and under the table are manuscripts, notebooks, and two or three paperbacks.'' She still cares then, in her own life, for the romantic ideal of the solitary artist. Having shown us her fidelity to this ideal, she can afford in the future to be more suspicious of her occasional desire to make a clean sweep of things: interpretation, the institution of authorship, even her apartment in Paris. The important work gets done in spite of the manifestoes. David Bromwich teaches English at Princeton and has contributed to The (London) Times Literary Supplement, Dissent and other jurnals. http://www.nytimes.com/1980/11/23/books/booksspecial/sontag-saturn.html --------------------------------- 'Styles of Radical Will' July 13, 1969 Reviewed by LAWRENCE M. BENSKY The subjects of the essays in this important book --- Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, containing pieces written since 1966 -- are major subjects of relevant intellectual concern in 1969: the avant-garde "esthetics of science," the pornographic classics of "The Story of O" and "The Image," French philosopher E.M. Cioran, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard. Is this to say she is fashionable? Readers can certainly find excuses for thinking so. The techniques she employs have something for everyone in the mind game: vast fields of reference, an easy use of traditional philosophical and literary analysis, ruthless self-criticism, a shifting focus of investigation. But since she uses such techniques better than almost any other writer today, Susan Sontag cannot be called fashionable, any more than a statue can be called statuesque. She's simply there, thoroughly herself. Where she is can best be seen in her own words. On esthetics: "As the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' ('the object,' the 'image'), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.... Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the every concreteness of the artist's tools ... appears as a trap. Practiced in a world furnished with secondhand perceptions, and specifically confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is cursed.... Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization -- the transcendence -- he desires. Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown." (And the "esthetics of silence" come to be written.) Or, on politics: "What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western, 'Faustian' man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.... [In Vietnam] an unholy dialectic is at work, in which the big wasteful society dumps its garbage, its partly unemployable proletarian conscripts, its poisons and its bombs upon a small, virtually defenseless, frugal society whose citizens, those fortunate enough to survive, then go about picking up the debris, out of which they fashion materials for daily use and self-defense." Who she is can be glimpsed in the following passage from her essay "'Thinking Against Oneself': Reflections on Cioran," for it provides something of an auto-portrait of Susan Sontag: "More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archeologists of ... ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era or permanent apocalypse." The key words are clear: "indignant," "stoical," "enigmatic," "complex," "useful." But one major adjective must be added: "moral" -- because the eight essays in "Styles of Radical Will" are mainly exercises in moral definition, as far as moral definition can be accomplished today on the two supremely and terrifyingly insecure areas of modern art and modern political brutality. Like all moralists, Miss Sontag hopes to inspire readers with the desire to act upon her principles. But there are insurmountable difficulties in acting upon them, and this is the final, most maddening element in the world she so brilliantly describes. For example: How is art -- even radical art -- "useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse?" As Miss Sontag has convincingly argued, good and bad have become useless concepts; the most valid forms -- in art, in philosophy -- are those which accommodate the greatest ambiguity; they are profoundly disturbing but are psychologically appropriate to our condition. Thus Bergman's "Persona" and the films of Godard are exemplary esthetic models. But art is not life; life drives one crazy and corrupts the language with which one could recognize one's condition, while art reinvents language and makes sure one recognizes just how badly off one is. Can such a vicious circle aid us in a moral definition? How "useful to individual survival" can it -- or similar intellectual structures -- be? This issue -- like so many -- reaches the point of crisis when Miss Sontag confronts the question of Vietnam in her essay "Trip to Hanoi," based on her visit there in the spring of 1968. It is her triumph that by being true to what she sees and feels -- her first concern -- she is able to transfer her artistic and philosophical values to politics without distorting them or losing herself, and find value and meaning where others have lapsed into political cliches or been struck dumb with horror. The placement of "Trip to Hanoi" as the concluding piece in the book is symbolic of the way in which Vietnam has wrenched many students, writers, teachers and intellectuals away from their guarded concerns into a field of experience where they must suddenly cope as never before. When "Trip to Hanoi" appeared last year in Esquire and later as a paperback, inmates of the liberal and radical wards in the cultural asylum roared in pain. How dare Susan Sontag use the Vietnamese as foils for her own personal psychological development? How dare she claim to be a radical and still spend time agonizing over agonizing at the typewriter? Aren't we getting gassed, clubbed, taxed, drafted, jailed while she is trying to decide what to say? Reading "Trip to Hanoi" now as a part of a collection, one sees how Miss Sontag's sensibility allowed her to risk these painful accusations. "What I'd been creating and enduring for the last few years was a Vietnam inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my stomach," she writes, adding that she is "a stubbornly unspecialized writer who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire." Hanoi changed that -- and "Trip to Hanoi" enables us to see how her attitude toward Vietnam does follow logically from the moral philosophy which she applies so successfully to esthetic questions. In art, she glories in the discovery of "tact" and "poise" amidst the roaring babble. On her trip, she delighted in the painful recognition of the virtues of the Vietnamese who were "fastidious" and "whole" in the unspeakable holocaust. To understand the nature of this achievement -- the clear-eyed translation of a vocabulary of art and philosophy into politics -- one must note again that Miss Sontag has been deeply influenced by the contemporary radical French intellectual tradition that concentrates on searching for the underlying structures -- often of an awesome complexity -- beneath the tangled and chaotic surface of individual acts. By creating a personal vocabulary that can permit her to define esthetic expression or political behavior as "tactful," "poised," "fastidious" and "whole," she is demonstrating an intellectual achievement both foreign to contemporary American usage and difficult to appropriate in times of artistic and political change. Even if one does not accept the annoying and sometimes difficult validity of intellectual accomplishment in a period of ferment and horror, one ignores the best of human creativity and personal honesty at one's peril. It should be remembered that Miss Sontag has now written four of the most valuable intellectual documents of the past 10 years: "Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," "The Aesthetics of Silence," and "Trip to Hanoi." In the world in which she's chosen to live, she continues to be the best there is. Mr. Bensky, a critic and former managing editor of Ramparts, lives in San Francisco. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/13/books/booksspecial/sontag-radical.html 'Trip to Hanoi' February 4, 1969 Reviewed by HERBERT MITGANG Susan Sontag, last season's literary pin-up, spent a couple of weeks in Hanoi in the spring as a reward for what the North Vietnamese regarded as a proper anti-American war attitude. Was this trip necessary? Not for the ordinary purposes of her "Trip to Hanoi," which is an interior journey with reportorial blinders. Although Miss Sontag proves herself still capable of ascending peaks of obscurity, her self-examination as a troubled American trying to balance the immorality of Vietnam and a sense of conscience makes her journey a thoughtful experience. A more dense discussion of the war and the future of American foreign policy is found in "No More Vietnams?," edited by Richard M. Pfeffer for the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. The book grew out of a conference of 26 certified "scholars with relevant expertise," former government officials and journalists. The intellectual varsity is all here but the book is difficult to digest because it has been arranged in dialectical form. The reason for mixing everybody together is explained in foundationese: "We judged," writes Stevenson Institute director William R. Polk, "that at this stage of our awakening understanding of the implications of Vietnam, conflicts in interpretation and opinion need to be emphasized rather than synthesized." The result is that "No More Vietnams?" has many voices talking at once. Nevertheless, the blackbirds in the pie do take wing when singled out: Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant on pacification: "The lesson which can be drawn here is one that the rest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more quickly than Americans have -- that, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard fighting for you, they you get bombing along with our troops." Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard: "The ethics of foreign policy must be an ethics of self-restraint. The saddest aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberration and intellectual scandal." Sir Robert Thompson, former Secretary for Defense in Malaya: "The prospect of going in as a political reformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touch political reform in these territories with a barge pole -- and I certainly would not touch it with an American political scientist." Edwin Reischauer, former Ambassador to Japan: "Vietnam has shown the limited ability of the United States to control at a reasonable cost the course of events in a nationally aroused, less developed nation.... I believe we are moving away from the application to Asia of the 'balance of power' and 'power vacuum' concepts of the cold war." It is unfortunate, though hardly to be anticipated, that this book's round table took place several months before McGeorge Bundy's speech at DePauw University last October calling for an end to bombing of North Vietnam. Since Mr. Bundy was more responsible than any Presidential adviser for the bombing and escalation of the war in Vietnam, his speech could have helped to focus the lessons set forth in "No More Vietnams?" For Mr. Bundy reversed himself not on grounds of the immorality of the war but of the lack of success ("its penalties upon us are much too great"). Most of the voices for sanity in this book, who seek to avoid future Vietnams, stress not success but morality. It is fortunate, on the other hand, that Miss Sontag arrived in Hanoi after the decision had been made in Washington to stop bombing the North Vietnam capital. For it gave her the opportunity to look inward. Being Susan Sontag, she quotes not Ho but Hegel after her interior journey to Hanoi: "As Hegel said, the problem of history is the problem of consciousness ... anything really serious I'd gotten from my trip would return me to my starting point: the dilemmas of being an American, an unaffiliated radical American, an American writer.... Radical Americans have profited from having a clear-cut moral issue on which to mobilize discontent and expose the camouflaged contradictions in the system." And that, if one may draw a conclusion from her conclusion, may bring the ultimate victory here of a lost war there: Cold-war concepts are being turned inside-out because the defeat, and convulsive social changes may result in a more humane America at home and abroad. Miss Sontag's "Trip to Hanoi" was indeed necessary and is well worth reading because it blows the mind's cobwebs. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/02/04/books/booksspecial/sontag-hanoi.html --------------------------------- 'Death Kit' August 18, 1967 Reviewed by ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH An old saw has it that the critical and creative imaginations are in some sly way antithetical, that their sensibilities are mutually subversive, that one cannot successfully do the job to the other. Like most old saws, this one is dull, bent and missing teeth; but beneath the flaking rust there is still an edge of truth. Lacking something better, one can use the instrument to hack away at least part of the mystery of how it happens that a critic of Susan Sontag's refined sensibilities can write fiction that is both tedious and demonstrably insensitive to the craft of fiction. As a critic, Miss Sontag has been original, provocative and intellectually rigorous. She is best known for her "Notes on Camp" (1964), but her essays on happenings, science-fiction movies, French writers and thinkers, etc. (collected in "Against Interpretation," 1966), have also had conspicuous and deserving impact on current critical thought, combining as they do, hawkish intellectuality with "gem-like flame" estheticism, and conventionally relativistic moral concerns with what virtually amounts to an ethic of pure style and relativity to sensation. If her critical writing has not always been entirely lucid, it has been fresh and fascinating, and idiomatically true to itself. Her novels are a different matter. In "The Benefactor" (1963), she explored, at tedious and wandering length, the dream- and waking-life of a fellow who wants to fashion actuality from his dreams -- a seemingly easy chore because his dreams are so undreamlike, and a chore because so dull. The novel was infused with ideas that had little dramatic relation to the narrative; voices where confused (the novel's and Miss Sontag's) or at any rate confusing, and the pacing was erratic. On the positive side, the novel was an attempt at innovation and -- one is grateful for surprises -- the tone throughout was not French and decadent, as one might expect, but resolute and even cheery. Much of the same may be said of "Death Kit," which skips, shuffles and snoozes over very similar territory. Its nonhero and occasional quasi-narrator is a 33-year-old, expensively educated, Pennsylvania businessman who is moderately thoughtful, entirely dependable in everyday matters, and nicknamed Diddy -- "the sort of man it's hard to dislike, and whom disaster avoids." But: "Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives." In fact, the life that Diddy inhabits is also unreal, as Miss Sontag evolves it. But this is as nothing compared with Diddy's immediate problem, which is: Did he bludgeon to death a railroad worker while his train was halted in a darkened tunnel -- as he himself believes -- or was he sitting all the time quietly in his seat, as Hester, the sensuous blind girl who hears all, testifies. The answer, or nonanswer, is suspected all along, though Miss Sontag seems not to care overmuch, and "all along" is a long, long way. During the lulls -- Diddy's dreams, who-knows-who's philosophical ruminations, Miss Sontag's epistemological riddles, the reader's daydreams, art vs. life, Gide, Camus, Freud vs. Jung vs. Wilhelm Reich, authenticity vs. reflection, action as indecisive evidence of no death quite yet, and so on and on and on -- one comes to think that Miss Sontag may have been taken in by Hester's post-tryst (in the train's bathroom) admonishment to Diddy: "There's no point in not doing what you want, is there? I mean, if nobody's stopping you." A novelist might have stopped before even this early point, and rethought character development, pacing, authenticity of tone and other antiquarian matters of craft. For instance, the small but nagging matter of the use of "now," in parentheses, presumably to heighten immediacy. What is its real effect? Or the much larger matter of Diddy's potentialities for thought. "Death, thought Diddy," Miss Sontag writes, "is like a lithographer's stone. One stone, cool and smooth to the touch, can print many deaths, virtually identical except to the expert eye. One lightly inscribed stone can be used, reused indefinitely." Well, no. Not the Diddy I know, anyway. He wouldn't have had a thought remotely like this, not in a million years. After a rousing beginning (except for those silly and reductive parenthetical "nows"), it heralds, I'm afraid, a rather meandering and fretful middle; the ending is a slight but well-done shocker, patterned perhaps on the classic thriller film, "Dead of Night." Did Diddy do it? Is Hester a loving liar? Is the railroad worker truly dead? Can Diddy prolong his tenancy in life? Are dreams more real that real? The persevering reader will earn what answers he can, with Miss Sontag's good-natured, earnest and (too) occasionally brilliant help, deduce. http://www.nytimes.com/1967/08/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-death.html --------------------------------- 'The Benefactor' September 8, 1963 Reviewed by DANIEL STERN For her first book Susan Sontag, a 30-year-old New Yorker, has chosen to write a carefully "modern" work, a picaresque anti-novel. The tone is detached, the action almost nonexistent, and the characters do not lead lives, they assume postures. We are not told the hero's surname or the name of his city, though this last is clearly Paris during the past 40 or 50 years. "The Benefactor" is the supposed memoir of an aging man named Hippolyte, who has dreamed his way through an ambiguous life. As a young man without any of the usual human ambitions, he abandons his university education and is supported by his wealthy, indulgent father. His primary purpose is solitary speculation, and to further this he lives only on the periphery of other lives. In line with this he frequents the salon of a foreign couple, the Anderses, a salon peopled by "virtuoso talkers." At about this time Hippolyte has the first of a series of disquieting dreams. Shortly afterward he makes his great decision: instead of using his dreams to interpret his life, he will use his life to interpret his dreams. Cued by a dream, he begins an affair with his hostess, Frau Anders. She is a plump, sensuous woman in her late thirties, and there is much talk about sensuality; yet it remains a curiously cerebral affair. >From this point on the novel alternates cinematic descriptions of dreams with what, for want of better words, must be called waking life. Both are cryptic, both devoid of identifiable drives and emotions. Along the way Hippolyte does some occasional acting in films, flirts with an experimental religion, has frequent conversations with a thief and sometime homosexual, takes a trip to an Arab country with Frau Anders, where he sells her into white slavery, marries and becomes a widower. None of these activities, however, has any dimensional life. Obviously meant to be emblematic, they are thin as experiences, undeveloped as ideas. Hippolyte also dreams numerous repetitious dreams, ponders them endlessly and keeps encountering Frau Anders, like a guilty conscience. The intent is to present waking life as if it were a dream. And, to present dreams as concrete as daily living. The result is that whatever Hippolyte does, participating in the making of a film, having an affair with a ludicrous leftist named Monique, visiting his dying father and mourning his young wife ... all are without motive or feeling. It has been said of the French that they develop an idea and then assume that it is the world. Hippolyte has decided that he is the world, and has proceeded to explore it. However, Miss Sontag has furnished her protagonist with an empty spirit. And, she uses irony as the chief instrument for her examination. The problem, here, is that genuine irony illuminates because it measures actions, or ideas, by implication, against an unspoken moral attitude or vision of life. Of these neither Hippolyte nor the author gives any indication. Part of the obligatory method of the roman nouveau is the use of the novel as a vehicle for the retelling of an ancient myth. Towards the end of "The Benefactor" what might have been suspected is revealed. Hippolyte is, of course, Hippolytus of the Greek myth, whose stepmother, Phaedra, attempts to seduce him; he refuses and she wreaks her revenge. We are told this, typically, in the form of a dream. "In the dream," Hippolyte recounts, "I am my famous namesake of myth and drama vowed to celibacy. Frau Anders is my lusty stepmother. But since this is a modern version of the story I do not spurn her. I accept her advances, enjoy her, and then cast her off. As the goddess in the opening of the ancient play declares, those who disregard the power of Eros will be chastised. Perhaps that is the meaning, or one of them, of all my dreams." The analogy, like the other themes in the book, remains an abstraction, unfleshed and, finally, unimportant. When, at the end, Hippolyte is relieved of his compulsion to dream, the significance is as cloudy as that of the dreams themselves. Miss Sontag is an intelligent writer who has, on her first flight, jettisoned the historical baggage of the novel. However, she has not replaced it with material or insights that carry equal, or superior, weight. Instead she has chosen the fashionable imports of neoexistentialist philosophy and tricky contemporary techniques. She has made an unfortunate exchange. Mr. Stern is the author of "Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die" and other books. http://www.nytimes.com/1963/09/08/books/booksspecial/sontag-benefactor.h tml --------------------------------- Susan Sontag Finds Romance August 2, 1992 By LESLIE GARIS As soon as Susan Sontag delivered the last section of her new novel, "The Volcano Lover," to the offices of her publisher, she felt bereft. "It was like taking a beloved person to the airport and returning to an empty house," she says softly, intensely, during a recent interview in her New York apartment. "I miss the people. I miss the world." The principal characters -- although there are many others -- are Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century English minister to the Court of Naples; his wife, Emma, and Horatio Lord Nelson, England's most revered naval hero, whose love affair with Emma became as famous as his impressive victories over Napoleon. Under the title (which refers to Hamilton's obsession with Mount Vesuvius), Sontag has appended the words, "A Romance." A romance by the author of "Against Interpretation," "Styles of Radical Will," "Death Kit" and "AIDS and Its Metaphors"? A romance by the intellectual champion of modernism; the eloquent admirer of Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Antonin Artaud? "In order to find the courage to write this book, it helped me to find a label that allowed me to go over the top," she explains. "The word 'romance' was like a smile. Also, the novel becomes such a self-conscious enterprise for people who read a lot. You want to do something that takes into account all the options you have in fiction. Yet you don't want to be writing about fiction, but making fiction. So I sprang myself from fictional self-consciousness by saying, It's a novel -- it's more than a novel -- it's a romance!" She opens her arms and laughs un-self-consciously. "And I fell into the book like Alice in Wonderland. For three years, I worked 12 hours a day in a delirium of pleasure. This novel is really a turning point for me." At 59, she has already had a remarkable career. Although she has written fiction, two plays and four films, she is primarily known for her learned and startling essays. Dealing from a seemingly limitless store of knowledge, she has examined the 20th century from widely divergent points of reference, like literature, painting, illness, photography, philosophy, pornography, film, sociology, anthropology, communism and fascism. Having lived for long periods in France and Italy, conversant in three languages (translated into 23), she is a true polymath internationalist. Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and man of letters, and another writer who straddles many cultures, compares her to Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the Renaissance: "This is one of the worst-informed eras in history, just like the beginning of the 15th century. Countries are ignorant about each other. And, like Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan Sontag is a communicator in this broken-down world. Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing. Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate. She is unique." As she sits in her kitchen, she does have the air of one who has wrestled prodigiously, and over a considerable lifetime, with essential questions. Wrinkles and creases run wild on her unadorned face. Her skin is as pale as a monk's. Her long, unruly, onyx-black hair is rent by a dramatic slash of pure white that runs like an ice flow over the crest of her head. But her candid expression, her round dark eyes that fill easily with tears, her frequent laughter and her deep, vibrant voice suggest the eagerness and avidity of a seeker; a curiously timeworn child who needs a bit more sleep. "I think I've always wanted to write this book," she is saying. "I'm glad to be free of the kind of one-note depressiveness that is so characteristic of contemporary fiction. I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up." "The Volcano Lover" anatomizes immense varieties of passionate engagement. Hamilton loves abjectly not only his art collection, which he continually augments, but Vesuvius, his beloved volcano, whose threats and displays of destructive energy hold him in permanent thrall. He loves Emma as a connoisseur loves a Leonardo, with cultivated, refined appreciation. Enter Nelson, the man of action, the genuine hero, and another sort of passion is ignited in Emma, which relegates Hamilton, the expert on nature's power, to the status of outsider in the drama of human forces unleashed under his own roof. And then there are the passions of revolution and an epic array of 18-century follies engendered by romantic dreams of reason. SONTAG, HERSELF, IS A hybrid of reason and romance. One need only peruse the vast library in her airy five-room apartment for confirmation. An intellectual who studies the history of ideas might have many books. But only a person intemperately in love with reading possesses 15,000. "I'm an addicted reader," she says, "a hedonist. I'm led by my passions. It's a kind of greed, in a way." She laughs happily. "I like to be surrounded by things that speak to me and uplift me." I ask how the books are arranged. "Ahhh. By subject or, in the case of literature, by language and chronologically. The 'Beowulf' to Virginia Woolf principle. I'll show you." "Nothing is alphabetical?" "I know people who have a lot of books. Richard Howard, for instance. He does his books alphabetically, and that sets my teeth on edge. I couldn't put Pynchon next to Plato! It doesn't make sense." We enter a room off the kitchen, where Karla Eoff, Sontag's assistant, sits at a desk answering what she describes as three years of correspondence -- all let go during the writing of "The Volcano Lover." "Here is English literature," says Sontag by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. "You need a ladder. It starts here, and here are the Chaucerians." She sweeps her hand over several shelves, "and then comes Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stuart plays, Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, the poets," she gestures on through dozens and dozens of books. "It's very approximate. Here's Beckford, William Blake and then Wordsworth." "You don't have a separate poetry section?" "No. It's all here. It's where they come. There's Byron. I have all of English literature here. There's Oscar Wilde, and there's Meredith and Hardy. Of course, when I get into the modern stuff you can see who I read and who I don't. For instance, I adore V. S. Naipaul. "And here's French literature. Up there is Montaigne, then Rabelais, Pascal, Racine, but it's not just the main people. I have a lot of so-called minor writers who aren't minor to me." We move from shelf to shelf, room to room. Spanish, French, Italian literature, all untranslated. Japanese, Greek, Chinese and Russian literature, in English. In the living room -- almost empty except for one couch, the only rug in the apartment and one Mission chair -- is ancient history, Judaism, a huge library of early Christianity, followed by Byzantium and the Middle Ages. In Sontag's study is an oddly giant-size burgundy velvet chair, a desk with an I.B.M. Selectric II typewriter (she has resisted the computer) and, of course books: here are philosophy, psychiatry and the history of medicine. Discreetly recessed next to a rose-colored marble fireplace is a tiny room that contains books by Sontag. "I used to keep them in my closet." "Why?" "Oh," she sighs deeply, "I don't want to look at my own books. A library is something to dream over, a sort of dream machine." "Have you read everything here?" "Oh, yes. Over and over. You see, they're full of slips of paper." Indeed, narrow strips of white paper stick up from the books like shoots of wild vegetation. "Each book is marked and filleted. I underline. I used to write in the margins when I was a child. Comments like 'How true!' And 'I have felt this also!' " She roars with laughter. I ask what she wrote in Aristotle. " 'Aristotle means here that' -- Oh, please! It's so embarrassing now." We enter the long hallway that connects the rooms. "The art river starts here." What appears to be a complete library of the history of art, all oversize books, runs on low shelves from one end of the hallway to the other. On the wall above the shelves is a series of engravings of Vesuvius, the hand-colored originals from a book commissioned by Hamilton in 1776. Under the prints, on top of the bookcase, is the skull of a horse and a circle of wishbones -- rather like a pagan altar to nature and death. In the rest of the apartment is Sontag's collection of black-and-white prints by Piranesi and other 18th-century artists. The volcano prints -- almost the only color in the house -- radiate with the lurid red of flowing lava. As I walk down the hall, from Greece into the Renaissance and through the 19th century, I remark on the uncanny perspective one has just passing by the titles. "Yes," she says. "What I do sometimes is just walk up and down and think about what's in the books. Because they remind me of all there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people remember." SONTAG'S childhood world, although not materially impoverished, was intellectually and emotionally meager. Her early years were spent in Arizona, where she rarely saw her alcoholic mother or her father, who had a fur business in China, because they spent almost all their time in the Far East. Susan and her younger sister were cared for by a housekeeper. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of tuberculosis. Her mother remarried, and the family moved to Los Angeles. Again, the adults traveled while the children stayed home. Her enormous intelligence further ordained her solitude. She read at 3, wrote a four-page newspaper at 8 and had a chemistry laboratory in her garage at 9. Many ardent, fruitless hours were spent trying to convert neighborhood children to her interests. "I can remember my first bookcase when I was 8 or 9. This is really speaking out of my isolation. I would lie in bed and look at the bookcase against the wall. It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom." "Did you have a mentor?" "No, no, no. I discovered books. When I was about 10 years old, I discovered the Modern Library in a stationery store in Tucson. And I sort of understood these were the classics. I used to like to read encyclopedias, so I had lots of names in my head. And here they were! Homer, Virgil, Dante, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens. I decided I would read them all." "With absolutely no encouragement?" I'm incredulous. "I didn't allow myself to look for it. And these people couldn't encourage me, since they didn't understand what I cared about. I very quickly located the source of judgment completely outside my life -- from the great dead. If somebody said, 'Oh, you're very smart,' I would feel as if I had been told I had black hair. It was such a given. And compared to the standards I was setting myself, I didn't think I was so smart. I thought that I cared more than other people. If they cared as much, they could do what I was doing. I didn't think I was a genius." "Wasn't your mother proud of you?" "My mother was a very withholding woman. You have no idea. . . ." Her voice drifts off. We are back in the kitchen. Her hair, which has been gathered into the semblance of a ponytail, has been gradually escaping from its elastic band, which she now removes entirely and plays with in her fingers. Her nails are so short I think she must have bitten them. She continues. "I would put my report card by her bed at night and find it signed at the breakfast table in the morning. She never said a word." She sighs. "I have a vision of my mother lying on her bed, with the blinds drawn, and a glass next to her that I thought was water, but I now know was vodka. She always said she was tired. As a consequence, I am happy to sleep four hours a night." Sontag's sister, Judith, was only 12 when Sontag left home at 15, and they hardly saw each other until they were both in their 50's. Judith, who is also extremely intelligent and went to Berkeley, is married, has one daughter and lives on the island of Maui, where she owns a small business. The two sisters discovered to their surprise that they had many things in common -- among them a love of books. "I think a childhood like that," Sontag says, "breeds a great talent for stoicism. If you're going to survive, you say, I can take this; it's bearable. Otherwise you're lost. I refuse to see myself as a victim. I'm the most unparanoid person in the world. In fact, I envy paranoids; they actually think people are paying attention to them." She laughs. "I didn't feel persecuted, I felt abandoned." When she was 15, her principal told her she was wasting her time at North Hollywood High and graduated her. She was delighted. Now her life would really begin. After one term at Berkeley, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, which at that time had a set curriculum and no electives. She took exams when she entered and placed out of most of her courses. She had already done the reading. "I audited classes in the graduate schools, and that was wonderful. I would start at 9 in the morning and go all day. It was a feast." It was there she met Philip Rieff, a young instructor in a social theory course that Sontag had placed out of. It was 1950, December of her second year. On friends' recommendations she went to hear him lecture on Freud (his 1959 book, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist," is essential reading for scholars). Ten days after the lecture, they were married. She was 17. It was an endless conversation. He was, she says today, the first person she could talk to. He seemed older than his 28 years, and Sontag looked extremely young. He was a dapper Anglophile, while she, a Westerner, lived in blue jeans and wore her hair long down her back. They were an odd-looking couple. Soon after they were married, she attended one of his lectures and behind her one student whispered to another, "Oh, have you heard? Rieff married a 14-year-old Indian!" For the next nine years, she and Rieff lived an academic life. Their son, David, was born in 1952. Sontag received master's degrees from Harvard in English literature and philosophy and finished her course work for a Ph.D. when she received a fellowship to Oxford. At the same time, Rieff was offered a fellowship at Stanford. They went separate ways for one academic year, but when Sontag returned to America the marriage unraveled. It was 1959, and Sontag at last realized one of her childhood dreams: she moved to New York. She had a child, a furnished mind and no income. "I had $70, two suitcases and a 7-year-old," Sontag recalls. (Her lawyer told her she was the first person in California history to refuse alimony.) David Rieff was another prodigy. He calls himself today "overeducated." His two books, "Going to Miami" and "Los Angeles, Capital of the Third World," were both critically acclaimed. I asked him about his childhood, if he felt under great intellectual pressure, and he said he was comfortable with scholarly activities -- athletics would have been a reach. He painted a picture of mother and son so close in age and interests that "separation -- even the ability to distinguish between who was who -- was difficult and took longer than it should have." During the first New York years, "I was very aware of how precarious our life was. We lived in very small, close quarters for a long time. Life was pretty tough. After that, things started to go much better. She was making a career." After a stint of teaching philosophy and the history of religion at various New York colleges, she wrote her first novel, "The Benefactor," and decided to stake her future on writing full time. In 1964, she emerged as a literary star with an audacious essay for Partisan Review, "Notes on Camp," which defined for the first time that esoteric, urban, cult sensibility, which exalted artifice and mocked seriousness. The essay is peppered with Oscar Wilde quotes, like "To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up." "On Style," an essay published the following year -- an exhortation to "encounter" art as "an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question" -- established her as the seer at the vanguard. She was dubbed the new "dark lady of American letters," the title previously assigned to Mary McCarthy. WHEN I ARRIVE AT HER Chelsea apartment for our second day of talks, she has been correcting the proofs of Emma's death scene and is awash with emotion. But it is clear that it is the whole project, the fact of this book -- which is so different from anything she has ever done -- that is overwhelming her this morning. I ask her again about her notion that "The Volcano Lover" is a turning point. "I think every ambitious writer looks for the right form, and I always felt whatever form I chose constricted me." Her two novels, "The Benefactor" and "Death Kit," both published in the 60's, received mixed reviews. Criticized for being too self-conscious, more concerned with modernist literary fashion than with the raw material of life, they were nevertheless praised for their powerful intelligence, original ideas and precise language. It has been 25 years since "Death Kit," during which time she has become internationally famous for her essays. Now she says the essay is a dead form for her. "The essays were a tremendous struggle. Each of the large ones took nine months to a year. I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay -- 30 or 40 drafts of every page. 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day." "When you say working, are you looking things up, checking references?" "No, no, I don't look anything up until after I've finished and I'm checking. No, it's just writing. I'd get started, and then I'd run into a ditch, and then I would start again -- and again." Temperamentally, Sontag is an admirer. All her best essays celebrate creators, thinkers or the created work of art. This quality led her into essay writing -- and led her out of it. "The Canetti essay was the beginning of the end. I wanted to honor Canetti." Her essay probably helped win him the Nobel Prize. "Yet as I was writing, I thought, 'Why am I doing this so indirectly? I have all this feeling -- I'm in a storm of feeling all the time -- and instead of expressing it I'm writing about people with feeling.' " Twelve years ago in London, while poking around the print shops near the British Museum, Sontag first saw the volcano prints Hamilton had commissioned. She was immediately drawn to them and bought several. Years later, she read a biography of Hamilton and the story began to simmer. "When I started the novel, it seemed like climbing Mount Everest. And I said to my psychiatrist, 'I'm afraid I'm not adequate.' Of course, that was a normal anxiety. What worried me was that I would not be writing essays, because they have a powerful ethical impulse behind them, and I think they make a contribution. But my psychiatrist said, 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to give people pleasure?' " She stops talking and bites her lip. She is clearly moved and is trying not to cry. She takes a deep breath. "And I thought, ohhhhhh. That sentence launched me." ILLNESS AS metaphor," "AIDS and Its Metaphors" and "On Photography" -- all book-length essays -- challenge us to consider a deeper view of the concept of illness and the effects of the visual image than we ordinarily attempt. Sontag's object is to liberate perception from the simple and reductive by offering a more layered analysis. Her essays equate complexity with clarity and obfuscation with oversimplification. "Ill people are haunted by dread, shame and humiliation," she says angrily. The two illness books are an attempt to rectify the human cost of these superstitious, medieval notions. Above all, she adds, "I am always struggling against stereotypes." Robert B. Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, which has published much of her writing, describes her quest to reject lazy assumptions as the "cautionary element in her work." Sontag calls it the "Don Quixote in me." Because her prose is polemical and her philosophy avant-garde, she has, on occasion, angered many older and more conservative critics. Richard Poirier, for many years an editor of Partisan Review, remembers when she was an exotically beautiful young writer for his magazine and aroused the ire of Phillip Rahv and others of the New York intellectual establishment, who distrusted both her enthusiasm for popular culture (film, dance, music) and her dense academic knowledge. "She was one of those rare creatures," he told me, "who knew about what was going on in the universities and in European criticism, who had the courage and the force of will and character to challenge the men in the intellectual community to pay attention to these things." IF HER INTELLECT IS rigorous and pure, so is her apartment, for aside from books and papers, the environment is strikingly Spartan. She says she goes out seven nights a week with friends for dinner, concerts, plays. She has phenomenal energy and stays out late, always ready to do one more thing, go one more place. ("Suddenly it's 4 in the morning," she says, "and somebody suggests something else. You go on. You don't say you're tired or you've had enough. Because you can never have enough.") Considering her abundant social life, I am amazed at the absence of furniture -- there are so few places to sit. Doesn't she have friends over? "No. This apartment is the inside of my head. It's a map of my brain." "Have you always lived alone?" "No, no. Not only have I at different times lived with lovers, but I've had friends come and stay. I like the idea that there are other bodies in other rooms." She has never remarried, but she has many intense friendships, which constitute a kind of multifarious international bond. FROM THE LATE 1960's to the mid-70's, Sontag was an expatriot. David had dropped out of Amherst College, and joined her in Paris, living in separate apartments, entirely absorbed by French culture, rarely speaking English. She returned to New York in 1976 (by then David was at Princeton), when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I remember when I was thrown into the world of people with cancer, one of the things that most surprised me was people saying, 'Why me?' But I saw that for lots of people these dramatic illnesses became victim situations. Illness is like a lottery -- some people get ill and you happen to be one of them. I didn't feel a victim of my illness." The prognosis was grim. At that time, New York oncologists were more alarmist about chemotherapy than they are now, so she chose to follow the treatment of Lucien Israel, a renowned French oncologist, who recommended radically high doses of chemotherapy, which, in the end, were administered by a reluctant Sloane-Kettering in New York. "My New York doctors said, 'Don't you realize that this is very extreme treatment and you're going to suffer a lot?' And I said" -- her voice is barely audible -- "but you people don't give me any hope. He's not promising anything, but he's offering much more treatment." She underwent chemotherapy for two and a half years -- an unheard-of amount of time in the 70's. The final cost was near $150,000. Since she had no medical insurance, Robert Silvers raised the money for her by writing letters and calling a number of her friends in the intellectual community. Almost everyone gave something, and those who were able gave a great deal. "Did you always have hope?" There is a long silence. "You live with two feelings. I thought I was going to die. But. . . ." She fingers a small clock with a double face; one for America and one for Europe. "I really wanted to fight for my life. I was told I had a 10 percent chance to live two years. I thought, well, somebody's got to be in that 10 percent." "How did you react to dying?" "I was terrified. Absolutely terrified and horrified. Horrible grief. Above all to leave David. And I loved life so much. But, I thought, I must believe I will die, because that's the only way I can have dignity or use the time that's left. But I also thought, well. . . ." Her voice rises and disappears. "I was never tempted to say, that's it. I love it when people fight for their lives." She knew Ingrid Bergman during her last illness and tried to persuade her to see Dr. Israel, but Bergman refused, saying she'd had a good life and didn't mind dying. Sontag is incensed as she tells this story. "I said, 'Why not have more of your life?' But she said, 'No, no, it's all right.' It drove me crazy -- that anybody would say that! It's, again, my mother, of course. Resignation, resignation, it drives me wild." She is now, except for slight problems with a kidney, in good health. She says that at 59 she notices no difference in her energy from her early 20's. There is a great deal of death -- even gore -- in "The Volcano Lover," and I ask her if she drew on her cancer experiences for those sections. "If you think you are going to die, and you are spared, you can never completely disconnect from the knowledge. You always feel a little posthumous. But I think one's imaginative participation in the horrors that are part of history. . . ." She looks outside. Her apartment has sweeping views of the Hudson River. "I can never take my own unhappiness really seriously because I think so much of how badly off most people in the world are." She has always had a high political profile, from her early radical days to her work on behalf the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. During the Vietnam War, she made a famous, controversial trip to Hanoi. She remembers a woman she saw in a factory there, working under the most abject conditions. When Sontag expressed outrage, the woman told her she was so much better off than her parents, because, as rice farmers, they lived up to their hips in water. "I don't think a week goes by when I don't think of that woman. 'I'm dry,' she said. 'I have work in which I'm dry.' " I'm reluctant to believe that social morality can be so internalized, and ask her if it doesn't seem "artificially rational" to ameliorate her own grief by making make such historic comparisons. "No, you don't decide!" She is leaning forward passionately. "You either are in touch with that imaginatively or you're not. It's not deciding -- it's the other way around. I can't screen it out. I feel I'm receiving messages all the time. And sometimes I'm overwhelmed." "Overwhelmed by what?" "By suffering. A friend once said to me, 'You are lacking a skin that most people have.' I'm also incredibly squeamish. I cannot watch most American movies. I don't even have television." AS PRESIDENT OF PEN in 1987 and as an original member in 1974 (with the founder, Richard Sennett) of the New York Institute for the Humanities, she has been an effective advocate for imprisoned writers. When Sontag conceived of "The Volcano Lover," she acquired an agent (Andrew Wylie) for the first time in her life and won a lucrative four-book deal with her lifelong publisher, Farrar Straus Giroux. With that advance, she bought this apartment. Then, in 1990, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, which will pay $340,000 over five years, plus medical insurance. She is at last comfortably, even luxuriously, set up. I experience the monkish silence in her apartment and ask her an odd question. "Do you believe in an afterlife in which you'll meet your literary heroes?" "No." "Most people hope to meet their relatives. You don't anticipate Homer and Dante?" I'm only partly joking. "Not at all. What pleases me is just the idea that I'm doing what they did. That's already so astonishing to me. Because. . . ." She is speechless. "Literature needs lots of people. It's enough to honor the project." "What is the project?" "Oh . . . to . . ." she sighs deeply ". . . to produce food for the mind, for the senses, for the heart. To keep language alive. To keep alive the idea of seriousness. You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question." Her leg is propped up childishly on the table. Each day, like a young graduate student, she has worn the same pair of sweatpants and sneakers, with different rumpled shirts. She is reluctant to talk about a next project, except to say she wants to write fiction. "To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same." Leslie Garis is a frequent contributer to this magazine on literary subjects. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/02/books/booksspecial/sontag-romance.html --------------------------------- Sontag Talking December 18, 1977 By CHARLES SIMMONS Q. Why is there more critical attention being paid to photography nowadays? Is photography getting better? A. In the time, the three years or so, that I was working on these essays, it seemed to become much more central. As late as 1973, photography books in bookstores tended to be in the back with gardening books and cookbooks. Now they have a section of their own, right up front near the cash register. The audience for photography books -- which is an important index to the interest in photography -- enormously enlarged just in that brief period. There have been many times more photography shows in museums in the past couple of years than there were, say, 10 years ago. There are many more photography galleries in large cities than there were 10 years ago. There's an interest everywhere. The New Yorker started an occasional photography column about two years ago. .But I can't believe it's because photography is better. In fact, I'm sure it isn't . There's no reason to think that there are more great photographers now than in the past. But now photography has respectability. The battle that has been going on since 1840 for photography to be acknowledged as an art form has finally been won. Indeed, photography as an art form interests a lot of people who were formerly interested mainly in painting and sculpture. Q. Could it be that painting and sculpture are simply less interesting? A. That's sometimes said. One hears that painting and sculpture are in a state of demoralization, that there are no exciting new figures conveying a sense that these are arts in which very important things are happening, such as people had in the 1950's and 60's. Another explanation that's often given is that the enormously inflated market for painting in the 60's priced many collectors out of the market and there was a need for a cheap object that people cold collect. And the third idea that you hear sometimes is that there's a reaction against difficulty in art. Not only is photography an art more easily practiced by large numbers of people, it's also easier to understand, easier to grasp. It makes fewer demands. For example, understanding serious contemporary photography doesn't involve knowing about the history of photography. But to understand serious contemporary painting one has to know something about the history of painting. Q. Did serious music complicate itself in recent years and lose its audience, so that popular music is now taken more seriously? A. If that is so, I think the fault is with the audience. In the past decade people have been less and less willing to take on difficult things. The very notion of professionalism came into disrepute as authoritarian, elitist. I don't think it's that the work got too complicated, I think it's that the audience got lazier. Seriousness has less prestige now. I don't mean to suggest that individual photographers aren't serious. But I think that the audience -- and we're still talking about a fairly small audience -- is less willing to be serious is that old-fashioned way that modernist art demands. It's very complicated, because part of modernism is the idea of antiart. So modernism itself, while being the breeding ground for all these great works of art starting from the end of the last century, contained the seeds of its own destruction. Too much emphasis was placed on outrage, and people got used to taking short cuts. Enough artists said we had to close the gap between art and life. Now people aren't willing to put in the work involved in entering these realms of discourse which distinguish art from life. Q. Modern art taught people how to be ironic about art, and that was a relief for a time. A. Enough artists said, "Down with art! No more masterpieces!" So it was inevitable that one day audiences would take this in a much simpler form and say, "Yes, down with art! No more masterpieces! We want an art that's comfortable, that's ironic, that's easy." I think we see the results everywhere. .More and more, audiences want quick results, they want punch lines from the beginning. Modernism always assumed that the recalcitrant bourgeois audience that could be shocked was going to hang onto its own standards. But when modernism became the established mode, it also became a contradiction in terms. And that, I think, is the situation in which photography has prospered. Q. There's a particularly intimate passage in your book in which you describe seeing in a bookstore in Santa Monica in 1945, when you were 12, photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and you make the extraordinary statement that you divide you life in half -- before seeing these photographs and after. And you say that something in you died at that midpoint. Do you know what that was, and do you want to talk about it? A. I think that that experience was perhaps only possible at that time, or a few years after. Today that sort of material impinges on people very early -- through television, say -- so that it would not be possible for anyone growing up later than the 1940's to be a horror virgin and to see atrocious, appalling images for the first time at the age of 12. That was before television, and when newspapers would print only very discreet photographs. As far as what died -- right then I understood that there is evil in nature. If you haven't heard that news before and it comes to you is so vivid a form, it's tremendous shock. It made me sad in a way that I still feel sad. It wasn't really the end of childhood, but it was the end of a lot of things. It changed my consciousness. I can still remember where I was standing and where on the shelf I found that book. Q. While you were writing this book did your attitude toward photography change? I had a sense that you credited photography more by the end of the book than at the start. A. I don't think it changed. What I did come to appreciate as I was writing these essays is how big a subject photography really is. In fact, I came to realize that I wasn't writing about photography so much as I was writing about modernity, about the way we are now. The subject of photography is a form of access to contemporary ways of feeling and thinking. And writing about photography is like writing about the world. In fact, as I said in the preface, I never intended to write all those essays. I wrote one essay in late 1973 and discovered when I was finishing it that I had more material left over that I though would be enough for a second essay. And while writing the second essay, I realized that I had enough material left over to write a third. And it became a sorcerer's apprentice situation. By the fourth essay I was seriously worried whether I could ever end it. And I would have gone on. I don't think I could have gone on from the sixth essay -- because that was consciously written in the spring of this year to close it off and to state the most general themes. But I could have written another essay between the fifth and the sixth. I have a lot more material, and the subject became deeper as I was working on it. Q. I was very interested in everything you said about Diane Arbus. You raised the question of how she got her models to pose for her. That's something of a mystery, isn't it? A. As Arbus said, the camera is a tremendous license in this society. You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. I was in a restaurant recently , and someone decided to take photographs at a neighboring table. It was a very expensive restaurant, the people who were there wanted it to be worth the money they were spending. The taking of photographs at this neighboring table involved flashbulbs, yet nobody seemed to mind that this monopolized everybody's attention for about 15 minutes. I stopped eating, stopped talking to the people who had invited me, and just watched -- as did practically everybody else. Everyone was fascinated; nobody minded the intrusion. The camera gives license to disturb people without offending them. It's a license to stop people on the street, ask to be admitted to their private space by saying, "I want to photograph you." Everybody's made nervous by it, but they're also flattered, as Arbus said, by the attention. Q. Are you put off by Richard Avedon's distorted photographs? Why do people sit for Avedon? A. It's difficult to refuse a photographer. This role, this activity, has a privileged place in our experience and in our lives. You have to be a professional recluse like Salinger or Pynchon to refuse being photographed. More generally, it's hard to resist the invitation to manifest oneself. I'm doing it with you now. If Richard Avedon asked to photograph me I would go and be photographed by him. He may not ask me, because we're friends, and he tends not to photograph people he knows. Q. The one he did of Renata Adler is awfully nice. A. Well, there are two photographs of Renata. There's the beautiful one with the hat, and there's another, which he told me he took the day they met; that was the way he wanted to photograph her. He has told me that he prefers to do that sort of photograph. Q. What sort? A. The kind you call distorted -- I say revealing. You could say that the way he photographs emphasized skin blemishes very much, because it's extremely accurate, sharp-focus photography. The image is unflattering in that way. But I don't agree that Avedon's photographs distort. I think, on the contrary, that we expect to be flattered by photography, we expect in fact that the photograph will show us to be better looking than we really are. Q. Photogenic. A. That notion of being "photogenic" actually means that you look better in a photograph than you do in real life. We all want to be photogenic; that is, we all want -- since the photograph is this thin slice of time -- to be photographed at that moment when we are looking better than usual. What Avedon has done is to take photographs which do not contain in any way the idea of the photogenic. Q. Which writers are you reading now? A. I don't know where to start. Since his death I've been reading all of Nabokov, I'm overwhelmed by how good he is. He gets better and better every time I reread him. I'm sad that he didn't get the Nobel Prize. So many second-rate writers have gotten it, one wants first-rate writers to get it too. And I've been reading and rereading Viktor Shklovsky, Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky. Q. What are you writing now? A. I'm finishing an essay called "Illness as Metaphor." And I'm writing a story, which will be called either "Act 1, Scene 2," or "The Letter." And then I've been at work on a novel for several years, off and on. I'll get back to that after the first of the year. Q. Is it a relief to get off one project and onto another? A. It's always a relief to do fiction; it's always a trial to do essays. They're much harder for me. An essay can go through 20 drafts, a work of fiction rarely goes through more than three or four drafts. With fiction, I'm almost there after the first draft. The second, third and fourth drafts are mostly cutting and fixing up. These photography essays took, each one of them, about six months. Some of the stories are done in a week. Q. On the other hand, the photography book is very ambitious, perhaps the first literary book on the subject. A. By "literary book," do you mean it's a book by a writer? Q. I mean you brought a literary sensibility to it. You don't agree with that? A. Well, many people seem to think that one should be a photography insider to write about photography as I've done. But no insider would do it. Only an outsider would write this kind of book. However, I'm not a literary, as opposed to visual, person. The distinction is trivial. It's because I do see "photographically" that I came to understand what a distinctive and momentous way of seeing that is. More generally, people don't like trespassers, and to people on the inside I'm a trespasser -- even though in fact I'm not. Also, I am not and don't want to be a photography critic. This isn't that kind of book. http://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/sontag-talking.html --------------------------------- The Decay of Cinema February 25, 1996 By SUSAN SONTAG Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that you can't look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions -- that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life. As many people have noted, the start of movie making a hundred years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In roughly the year 1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life (the Lumiere brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very transcription of the most banal reality -- the Lumiere brothers filming "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" -- was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder. Everything in cinema begins with that moment, 100 years ago, when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them. Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of "going to the movies" was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers. No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals -- erotic, ruminative -- of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment. In the first years there was, essentially, no difference between these two forms. And all films of the silent era -- from the masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Pabst, Murnau and King Vidor to the most formula-ridden melodramas and comedies -- are on a very high artistic level, compared with most of what was to follow. With the coming of sound, the image making lost much of its brilliance and poetry, and commercial standards tightened. This way of making movies -- the Hollywood system -- dominated film making for about 25 years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). The most original directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, were defeated by the system and eventually went into artistic exile in Europe -- where more or less the same quality-defeating system was now in place, with lower budgets; only in France were a large number of superb films produced throughout this period. Then, in the mid-1950's, vanguard ideas took hold again, rooted in the idea of cinema as a craft pioneered by the Italian films of the immediate postwar period. A dazzling number of original, passionate films of the highest seriousness got made. It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself. Cinephilia had first become visible in the 1950's in France: its forum was the legendary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by similarly fervent magazines in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and Canada). Its temples, as it spread throughout Europe and the Americas, were the many cinematheques and clubs specializing in films from the past and directors' retrospectives that sprang up. The 1960's and early 1970's was the feverish age of movie-going, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center. "One can't live without Rossellini," declares a character in Bertolucci's "Before the Revolution" (1964) -- and means it. For some 15 years there were new masterpieces every month. How far away that era seems now. To be sure, there was always a conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art, cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films, sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema. Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry. The great cinema of the 1960's and 1970's has been thoroughly repudiated. Already in the 1970's Hollywood was plagiarizing and rendering banal the innovations in narrative method and in the editing of successful new European and ever-marginal independent American films. Then came the catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980's, which secured the worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and distributing films on a far more coercive, this time truly global scale. Soaring producton costs meant that a film had to make a lot of money right away, in the first month of its release, if it was to be profitable at all -- a trend that favored the blockbuster over the low-budget film, although most blockbusters were flops and there were always a few "small" films that surprised everyone by their appeal. The theatrical release time of movies became shorter and shorter (like the shelf life of books in bookstores); many movies were designed to go directly into video. Movie theaters continued to close -- many towns no longer have even one -- as movies became, mainly, one of a variety of habit-forming home entertainments. In this country, the lowering of expectations for quality and the inflation of expectations for profit have made it virtually impossible for artistically ambitious American directors, like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader, to work at their best level. Abroad, the result can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest directors of the last decades. What place is there today for a maverick like Hans- Jurgen Syberberg, who has stopped making films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films about the history of film, on video? Consider some other cases. The internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts were disastrous for Andrei Tarkovsky in the last two films of his stupendous (and tragically abbreviated) career. And how will Aleksandr Sokurov find the money to go on making his sublime films, under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism? Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being made: Mike Leigh's "Naked," Gianni Amelio's "Lamerica," Fred Kelemen's "Fate." But you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema's glorious past). Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard's "Breathless" cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films. For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films, too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated. If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too . . . no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of "The Volcano Lover," a novel, and "Alice in Bed," a play. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-cinema.html --------------------------------- Regarding the Torture of Others May 23, 2004 By SUSAN SONTAG I. For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.'' Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors. Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military figures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims -- it is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage. Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.'' To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. II. Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe. There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges. An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate. III. To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them. Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more -- contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?'' Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. IV. The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret. The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of ''suspects'' -- the principal justification for holding them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable. Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out -- these are the euphemisms for the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was describing. The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget. So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read: critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials. Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right to defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists) started it. They -- Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over the photographs than by what the photographs show. ''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.'' It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of these photos. There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not because of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,'' Senator Graham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men in a hallway -- a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked at.'' An attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version; according to The Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a civilian contractor working with military intelligence. V. But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as between spin and policy -- can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.'' Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably, not for those who are the actual -- and potential? -- victims of torture. The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.'' But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America. After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain of Others.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html --------------------------------- Why Are We in Kosovo? May 2, 1999 By SUSAN SONTAG The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari -- where I am living for a couple of months -- to ask whether I am all right and inquired in passing whether I can hear sounds of the bombing. I reassured her that not only could I not hear the bombs dropping on Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina from downtown Bari, but even the planes taking off from the nearby NATO base of Gioia del Colle are quite inaudible. Though it is easy to mock my geographyless American friend's vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a nice complement to the widely held vision of Helpless Europe being dragged into a bellicose folly by Big Bad America. Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing this from Italy -- weakest link in the NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and Germany) continues to maintain an embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic has received the Italian Communists' party leader, Armando Cossutta. The estimable mayor of Venice has sent an envoy to Belgrade with letters addressed to Milosevic and to the ethnic Albanian leader with whom he has met, Ibrahim Rugova, proposing Venice as a site for peace negotiations. (The letters were accepted, thank you very much, by the Orthodox primate following the Easter Sunday service.) But then it is understandable that Italy has panicked: Italians see not just scenes of excruciating misery on their TV news but images of masses on the move. In Italy, Albanians are first of all future immigrants. But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America. (Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American popular culture in Europe could hardly be more total.) On both the so-called left and the so-called right, identity-talk is on the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the protest against the war has been growing in recent years in many of the nations of the New Europe, and is perhaps best understood as a displacement of the anxiety about this New Europe, which everyone has been told is a Good Thing and few dare question. Nations are communities that are always being imagined, reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining Other. The specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous nation, is bound to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing America. Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The truth is that the made-for-business Europe being brought into existence with the enthusiastic assent of the ''responsible'' business and professional elites is a Europe precisely designed to be incapable of responding to the threat posed by a dictator like Milosevic. This is not a question of ''weakness,'' though that is how it is being experienced. It is a question of ideology. It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that Europe, the Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism in 1989, is up to something else. Something which indeed renders obsolete most of the questions of justice -- indeed, all the moral questions. (What prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may be conjoined with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.) A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand wringing . . . but haunted by the fear of national identities being swamped either by faceless multinational commercialism or by tides of alien immigrants from poor countries. In one part of the continent, former Communists play the nationalist card and foment lethal nationalisms -- Milosevic being the most egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it war, are presumed to be superseded, outmoded. How helpless ''our'' Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe. And meanwhile the war goes on. A war that started in 1991. Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs would have it, six centuries ago, either. Theirs is a country whose nationalist myth has as its founding event a defeat -- the Battle of Kosovo, lost to the Turks in 1389. We are fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding the mortar emplacements on the heights of Sarajevo would assure visiting journalists. Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around the memory of the Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its eternal enmity with Great Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe. And ''they'' are not. Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die. A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides -- that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not ''really'' Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all. Living on the edge of NATO Europe, only a few hundred kilometers from the refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and Blace, from the greatest mass of suffering in Europe since the Second World War, it is true that I can't hear the NATO planes leaving the base here in Puglia. But I can walk to Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian and Kosovar families pouring off the daily ferries from Durres -- legal immigrants, presumably -- or drive south a hundred kilometers at night and see the Italian coast guard searching for the rubber dinghies crammed with refugees that leave Vlore nightly for the perilous Adriatic crossing. But if I leave my apartment in Bari only to visit friends and have a pizza and see a movie and hang out in a bar, I am no closer to the war than the television news or the newspapers that arrive every morning at my doorstep. I could as well be back in New York. Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she thought to herself, How terrible, but that's in Croatia, that can never happen here in Bosnia . . . and switched the channel. The following year, when the war started in Bosnia, she learned differently. Then she became part of a story on television that other people saw and said, How terrible . . . and switched the channel. How helpless ''our'' pacified, comfortable Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -- of refugees, people who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched villages, by the hundreds of thousands and who look like us. Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable of indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet, of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and imperial rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war? We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our attempt to forge a ''humanitarian'' response. Our inability (yes, after Auschwitz!) to comprehend how such horrors can take place. And as the horrors multiply, it becomes even more incomprehensible why we should respond to any one of them (since we have not responded to the others). Why this horror and not another? Why Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet? Are we not saying that European lives, European suffering are more valuable, more worth acting on to protect, than the lives of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia? One answer to this commonly voiced objection to NATO's war is to say boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of the people in Kosovo is Eurocentric, and what's wrong with that? But is not the accusation of Eurocentrism itself just one more vestige of European presumption, the presumption of Europe's universalist mission: that every part of the globe has a claim on Europe's attention? If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily, say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized this initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have asked what right these states have to intervene in Rwanda when they have done nothing on behalf of the Kurds or the Tibetans? Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that the war is -- wonderful word -- illegal,'' because NATO is violating the borders of a sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all, part of the new Greater Serbia called Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the Kosovars that Milosevic revoked their autonomous status in 1989. Inconvenient that 90 percent of Kosovars are Albanians -- ethnic Albanians'' as they are called, to distinguish them from the citizens of Albania. Empires reconfigure. But are national borders, which have been altered so many times in the last hundred years, really to be the ultimate criterion? You can murder your wife in your own house, but not outdoors on the street. Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision? Push the supposition into the present. What if the French Government began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the rest out of Corsica . . . or the Italian Government began emptying out Sicily or Sardinia, creating a million refugees . . . or Spain decided to apply a final solution to its rebellious Basque population. Wouldn't we agree that a consortium of powers on the continent had the right to use military force to make the French (or Italian, or Spanish) Government reverse its actions, which would probably mean overthrowing that Government? But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe. My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can ''the West'' be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're Europeans. Surely ''they'' won't allow it to go on. But they -- Europe -- did. For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From the Serb death camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps on European soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer of 1995 -- Europe tolerated that. So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe. Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the 20th century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at Sarajevo. If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable, it is because NATO's actions come eight years too late. Milosevic should have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in 1991. Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying that even if there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest assured, this would be the last thing that Milosevic would be allowed to get away with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he would never be allowed to make war on Kosovo. But who believed the Americans then? Not the Bosnians. Not Milosevic. Not the Europeans. Not even the Americans themselves. After Dayton, after the destruction of independent Bosnia, it was time to go back to sleep, as if the series of events set in motion in 1989 with the accession to power of Milosevic and the revocation of autonomous status for the province of Kosovo, would not play out to its obvious logical end. If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what happens in the southeastern corner of Europe, imagine how hard it is for Americans to think it is in their interest. It is not in America's interest to push this war on Europe. It is very much not in Europe's interest to reward Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of so much human suffering. Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument of some. And the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the neighboring countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly bring on the destruction of the fragile new state of Macedonia and the redrawing of the map of the Balkans -- certain to be disputed by, at the very least, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we imagine this will happen peacefully? Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing. Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust. No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most ''wars'' are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as ''age-old ethnic hatreds.'' (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.) War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it has been bungled. Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes. Worthy goals. But how is any of this conceivably going to happen unless the Milosevic regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not going to happen.) Impossible to see how this war will play out. All the options seem improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable to keep bombing indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept the destruction of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to stop bombing, if Milosevic remains intransigent. The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples. War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon. Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''The Volcano Lover: A Romance.'' She is completing a new novel. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/books/booksspecial/sontag-kosovo.html --------------------------------- First Chapter: 'In America' March 12, 2000 By SUSAN SONTAG PERHAPS IT WAS the slap she received from Gabriela Ebert a few minutes past five o'clock in the afternoon (I'd not witnessed that) which made something, no, everything (I couldn't have known this either) a little clearer. Arriving at the theatre, inflexibly punctual, two hours before curtain, Maryna had gone directly to her star's lair, been stripped to her chemise and corset and helped into a fur-lined robe and slippers by her dresser, Zofia, whom she dispatched to iron her costume in an adjoining room, had pushed the candles nearer both sides of the mirror, had leaned forward over the jumbled palette of already uncapped jars and vials of makeup for a closer scrutiny of that all too familiar mask, her real face, the actress's under-face, when behind her the door seemed to break open and in front of her, sharing the mirror, hurtling toward her, she saw her august rival's reddened, baleful face shouting the absurd insult, threw herself back in her chair, turned, glimpsed the arm descending just before an involuntary grimace of her own brought down her eyelids at the same instant it bared her upper teeth and shortened her nose, and felt the shove and sting of a large beringed hand against her face. It all happened so rapidly and noisily her eyes stayed closed, the door banged shut and the shadow-flecked room with its hissing gas jets had gone so silent now, it might have been a bad dream: she'd been having bad dreams. Maryna clapped her palm to her offended face. "Zofia? Zofia!" Sound of the door being opened softly. And some anxious babble from Bogdan. "What the devil did she want? If I hadn't been down the corridor with Jan, I would have stopped her, how dare she burst in on you like that!" "It's nothing," Maryna said, opening her eyes, dropping her hand. "Nothing." Meaning: the buzz of pain in her cheek. And the migraine now looming on the other side of her head, which she intended to keep at bay by a much-practiced exercise of will until the end of the evening. She bent forward to tie her hair in a towel, then stood and moved to the washstand, where she vigorously soaped and scrubbed her face and neck, and patted the skin dry with a soft cloth. "I knew all along she wouldn't " "It's all right," said Maryna. Not to him. To Zofia, hesitating at the half-open door, holding the costume aloft in her outstretched arms. Waving her in, Bogdan shut the door a bit harder than he intended. Maryna stepped out of her robe and into the burgundy gown with gold braiding ("No, no, leave the back unbuttoned!"), rotated slowly once, twice, before the cheval glass, nodded to herself, sent Zofia away to repair the loose buckle on her shoe and heat the curling iron, then sat at the dressing table again. "What did Gabriela want?" "Nothing." "Maryna!" She took a tuft of down and spread a thick layer of Pearl Powder on her face and throat. "She came by to wish me the best for tonight." "Really?" "Quite generous of her, wouldn't you agree, since she'd thought the role was to be hers." "Very generous," he said. And, he thought, very unlike Gabriela. He watched as three times she redid the powder, applied the rouge with a hare's foot well up on her cheekbones and under her eyes and on her chin, and blackened her eyelids, and three times took it all off with a sponge. "Maryna?" "Sometimes I think there's no point to any of this," she said tonelessly, starting again on her eyelids with the charcoal stick. "This?" She dipped a fine camel's-hair brush into the dish of burnt umber and traced a line under her lower eyelashes. It seemed to Bogdan she was using too much kohl, which made her beautiful eyes look sorrowful, or merely old. "Maryna, look at me!" "Dear Bogdan, I'm not going to look at you." She was dabbing more kohl on her brows. "And you're not going to listen to me. You should be inured by now to my attacks of nerves. Actor's nerves. A little worse than usual, but this is a first night. Don't pay any attention to me." As if that were possible! He bent over and touched his lips to the nape of her neck. "Maryna ..." "What?" "You remember that I've taken the room at the Saski for a few of us afterward to celebrate " "Call Zofia for me, will you?" She had started to mix the henna. "Forgive me for bringing up a dinner while you're preparing for a performance. But it should be called off if you're feeling too ... "Don't," she murmured. She was blending a little Dutch pink and powdered antimony with the Prepared Whiting to powder her hands and arms. "Bogdan?" He didn't answer. "I'm looking forward to the party," she said and reached behind for a gloved hand to lay on her shoulder. "You're upset about something." "I'm upset about everything," she said dryly. "And you'll be so kind as to let me wallow in it. The old stager has need of a little stimulation to go on doing her best!" MARYNA DID NOT RELISH lying to Bogdan, the only person among all those who loved her, or claimed to love her, whom she did in fact trust. But she had no place for his indignation or his eagerness to console. She thought it might do her good to keep this astonishing incident to herself. Sometimes one needs a real slap in the face to make what one is feeling real. When life cuffs you about, you say, That's life. You feel strong. You want to feel strong. The important thing is to go forward. As she had, single-mindedly, or almost: there had been much to ignore. But if you are of a stoical temperament, and have a talent for self-respect, and have worked hard with another talent God gave you, and have been rewarded exactly as you had dared to hope for your diligence and persistence, indeed, your success arrived more promptly than you expected (or perhaps, you secretly think, merited), you might then consider it petty to remember the slights and nurture the grievances. To be offended was to be weak like worrying about whether one was happy or not. Now you have an unexpected pain, around which the muffled feelings can crystallize. You have to float your ideals a little off the ground, to keep them from being profaned. And cut loose the misfortunes and insults, too, lest they take root and strangle your soul. Take the slap for what it was, a jealous rival's frantic comment on her impregnable success that would have been something to share with Bogdan, and soon put out of mind. Take it as an emblem, a summons to respond to the whispery needs she'd been harboring for months this would be worth keeping to herself, even cherishing. Yes, she would cherish poor Gabriela's slap. If that slap were a baby's smile, she would smile at the recollection of it, if it were a picture, she would have it framed and kept on her dressing table, if it were hair, she would order a wig made from it ... Oh I see, she thought, I'm going mad. Could it be as simple as that? She'd laughed to herself then, but saw with distaste that the hand applying henna to her lips was trembling. Misery is wrong, she said to herself, mine no less than Gabriela's, and she only wants what I have. Misery is always wrong. Crisis in the life of an actress. Acting was emulating other actors and then, to one's surprise (actually, not at all to one's surprise), finding oneself better than any of them were including the pathetic bestower of that slap. Wasn't that enough? No. Not anymore. She had loved being an actress because the theatre seemed to her nothing less than the truth. A higher truth. Acting in a play, one of the great plays, you became better than you really were. You said only words that were sculpted, necessary, exalting. You always looked as beautiful as you could be, artifice assisting, at your age. Each of your movements had a large, generous meaning. You could feel yourself being improved by what was given to you, on the stage, to express. Now it would happen that, mid-course in a noble tirade by her beloved Shakespeare or Schiller or Slowacki, pivoting in her unwieldy costume, gesturing, declaiming, sensing the audience bend to her art, she felt no more than herself. The old self-transfiguring thrill was gone. Even stage fright that jolt necessary to the true professional had deserted her. Gabriela's slap woke her up. An hour later Maryna put on her wig and papier-m?ch? crown, gave one last look in the mirror, and went out to give a performance that even she could have admitted was, by her real standards for herself, not too bad. BOGDAN WAS so captivated by Maryna's majesty as she went to be executed that at the start of the ovation he was still rooted in the plush-covered chair at the front of his box, hands clenching the rail. Galvanized now, he slipped between his sister, the impresario from Vienna, Ryszard, and the other guests, and by the second curtain call had made his way backstage. "Mag-ni-fi-cent," he mouthed as she came off from the third curtain call to wait beside him in the wings for the volume of sound to warrant another return to the flower-strewn stage. "If you think so, I'm glad." "Listen to them!" "Them! What do they know if they've never seen anything better than me?" After she'd conceded four more curtain calls, Bogdan escorted her to the dressing-room door. She supposed she was starting to allow herself to feel pleased with her performance. But once inside, she let out a wordless wail and burst into tears. "Oh, Madame!" Zofia seemed about to weep, too. Stricken by the anguish on the girl's face and intending to comfort her, Maryna flung herself into Zofia's arms. "There, there," she murmured as Zofia held her tightly, then let go with one arm and delicately patted Maryna's crimped, stiffened mass of hair. Maryna released herself reluctantly from the girl's unwavering grip and met her stare fondly. "You have a good heart, Zofia." "I can't stand to see you sad, Madame." "I'm not sad, I'm ... Don't be sad for me." "Madame, I was in the wings almost the whole last act, and when you went to die, I never saw you die as good as that, you were so wonderful I just couldn't stop crying." "Then that's enough crying for both of us, isn't it?" Maryna started to laugh. "To work, you silly girl, to work. Why are we both dawdling?" Relieved of her regal costume and reclothed in the fur-lined robe. Maryna sponged off Mary Stuart's face and swiftly laid on the discreet mask suitable to the wife of Bogdan Dembowski. Zofia, sniffling a little ("Zofia, enough!"), stood behind her chair embracing the sage-green gown Maryna had chosen that afternoon to wear to the dinner Bogdan was giving at the Hotel Saski. She put the gown on slowly in front of the cheval glass, returned to the dressing table and undid the curls and brushed and rebrushed her hair, then piled it loosely on her head, looked closer into the mirror, added a little melted wax to her eyelashes, stood again, inspected herself once more, listening to the ascending din in the corridor, took several loud, rhythmical breaths, and opened the door to an enveloping wave of shouts and applause. Among the admirers well connected enough to be admitted backstage were some acquaintances but, except for Ryszard, clasping a bouquet of silk flowers to his broad chest, she saw no close friends: those invited to the party had been asked to go on ahead to the hotel. And more than a hundred people were waiting outside the stage door, despite the foul weather. Bogdan offered the shelter of his sword-umbrella with the ivory handle so she could linger for fifteen minutes under the falling snow, and she would have lingered another fifteen had he not waved away the more timid fans, their programs still unsigned, and shepherded Maryna through the crowd toward the waiting sleigh. Ryszard, finally pressing his bouquet into her hands, said the Saski was only seven streets away and that he preferred to walk. How strange, in her native city to be receiving friends in a hotel, but for the last five years her talents having led her inexorably to the summit, an engagement for life at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw she no longer had an apartment in Krak w. "Strange," she said. To Bogdan, to no-one, to herself. Bogdan frowned. A thunderbolt, like the crack of gunfire, as they arrived at the hotel. A scream, no, only a shout: an angry coachman. They walked up the carpeted marble staircase. "You're all right?" "Of course I'm all right. It's only another entrance." "And I have the privilege of opening the door for you." Now it was Maryna's turn to frown. And how could there not be applause and beaming faces, customary welcome at a first-night party but she really had given a splendid performance as Bogdan opened the door (in answer to her "Bogdan, are you all right?" he had sighed and taken her hand) and she made her entrance. Piotr ran to her arms. She embraced Bogdan's sister and gave her Ryszard's silk flowers; she let herself be embraced by Krystyna, whose eyes had filled with tears. After the guests, gathering closely around her, had each paid tribute to her performance, she looked from face to face, and then sang out gleefully: May you a better feast never behold, You knot of mouth friends! Upon which words everyone laughed, which means, I suppose (I had not arrived yet), that she said Timon's lines in Polish, not English, but also means that nobody except Maryna had read Timon of Athens, for the feast in the play is not a happy one, above all for its giver. Then the guests spread about the large room and began talking among themselves about her performance and, after that, about the larger question afoot (which is more or less when I arrived, chilled and eager to enter the story), while Maryna had forced herself toward humbler, less sardonic thoughts. No jealous rivals here. These were her friends, those who wished her well. Where was her gratitude? She hated her discontents. If I can have a new life, she was thinking, I shall never complain again. "MARYNA?" No answer. "Maryna, what's wrong?" "What could be wrong ... doctor?" He shook his head. "Oh, I see." "Henryk." "That's better." "I'm disturbing you." "Yes" he smiled "you disturb me, Maryna. But only in my dreams, never in my consulting room." Then, before she could rebuke him for flirting with her: "The splendors of your performance last night," he explained. He saw her still hesitating. "Come in" he held out his hand "Sit" he waved at a tapestry-covered settee "Talk to me." Two steps into the room, she leaned against a bookcase. "You're not going to sit?" "You sit. And I'll continue my walk ... here." "You came here on foot in this weather? Was that wise?" "Henryk, please!" He sat on the corner of his desk. She began to pace. "I thought I was coming here to besiege you with questions about Stefan, if he really " "But I've told you," Henryk interrupted, "that the lungs already show a remarkable improvement. Against such a mighty enemy, the struggle waged by doctor and patient is bound to be long. But I think we're winning, your brother and I." "You talk rubbish, Henryk. Has anyone ever told you that?" "Maryna, what's the matter?" "Everyone talks rubbish " "Maryna ..." "Including me." "So" he sighed "it isn't Stefan you wanted to consult me about." She shook her head. "Then let me guess," he said, venturing a smile. "You're making fun of me, my old friend," Maryna said somberly. "Women's nerves, you're thinking. Or worse." "I?" he slapped the desk "I, your old friend, as you acknowledge, and I thank you for that, I not take my Maryna seriously?" He looked at her sharply. "What is it? Your headaches?" "No, it's not about"---she sat down abruptly "me. I mean, my headaches." "I'm going to take your pulse," he said, standing over her. "You're flushed. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a touch of fever." After a moment of silence, while he held her wrist then gave it back to her, he looked again at her face. "No fever. You are in excellent health." "I told you there was nothing wrong." "Ah, that means you want to complain to me. Well, you shall find me the most patient of listeners. Complain, dear Maryna," he cried gaily. He didn't see the tears in her eyes. "Complain!" "Perhaps it is my brother, after all." "But I told you " "Excuse me"---she'd stood "I'm making a fool of myself." "Never! Please don't go." He rose to bar her way to the door. "You do have a fever." "You said I didn't." "The mind can get overheated, just like the body." "What do you think of the will, Henryk? The power of the will." "What sort of question is that?" "I mean, do you think one can do whatever one wants?" "You can do whatever you want, my dear. We are all your servants and abettors." He took her hand and inclined his head to kiss it. "Oh" she pulled away her hand "you disgusting man, don't flatter me!" He stared for a moment with a gentle, surprised expression. "Maryna, dear," he said soothingly. "Hasn't your experience taught you anything about how others respond to you?" "Experience is a passive teacher, Henryk." "But it " "In paradise" she bore down on him, her grey eyes glittering "there will be no experiences. Only bliss. There we will be able to speak the truth to each other. Or not need to speak at all." "Since when have you believed in paradise? I envy you." "Always. Since I was a child. And the older I get, the more I believe in it, because paradise is something necessary." "You don't find it ... difficult to believe in paradise?" "Oh," she groaned, "the problem is not paradise. The problem is myself, my wretched self." "Spoken like the artist you are. Someone with your temperament will always " "I knew you would say that!" She stamped her foot. "I order you. I implore you, don't speak of my temperament!" (Yes she had been ill. Her nerves. Yes she was still ill, all her friends except her doctor said among themselves.) "So you believe in paradise," he murmured placatingly. "Yes, and at the gates of paradise, I would say, Is this your paradise? These ethereal figures robed in white, drifting among the white clouds? Where can I sit? Where is the water?" "Maryna ..." Taking her by the hand, he led her back to the settee. "I'm going to pour you a dram of cognac. It will be good for both of us." "You drink too much, Henryk." "Here." He handed her one of the glasses and pulled a chair opposite her. "Isn't that better?" She sipped the cognac, then leaned back and gazed at him mutely. "What is it?" "I think I will die very soon, if I don't do something reckless ... grand. I thought I was dying last year, you know." "But you didn't." "Must one die to prove one's sincerity!" FROM A LETTER to nobody, that is, to herself: It's not because my brother, my beloved brother, is dying and I will have no one to revere ... it's not because my mother, our beloved mother, grates on my nerves, oh, how I wish I could stop her mouth ... it's not because I too am not a good mother (how could I be? I am an actress) ... it's not because my husband, who is not the father of my son, is so kind and will do whatever I want ... it's not because everyone applauds me, because they cannot imagine that I could be more vivid or different than I already am ... it's not because I am thirty-five now and because I live in an old country, and I don't want to be old (I do not intend to become my mother) ... it's not because some of the critics condescend, now I am being compared with younger actresses, while the ovations after each performance are no less thunderous (so what then is the meaning of applause?) ... it's not because I have been ill (my nerves) and had to stop performing for three months, only three months (I don't feel well when I am not working) ... it's not because I believe in paradise ... oh, and it's not because the police are still spying and making reports on me, though all those reckless statements and hopes are long past (my God, it's thirteen years since the Uprising) ... it's not for any of these reasons that I've decided to do something that nobody wants me to do, that everyone regards as folly, and that I want some of them to do with me, though they don't want to; even Bogdan, who always wants what I want (as he promised, when we married), doesn't really want to. But he must. "PERHAPS IT IS a curse to come from anywhere. The world, you see," she said, "is very large. I mean," she said, "the world comes in many parts. The world, like our poor Poland, can always be divided. And subdivided. You find yourself occupying a smaller and smaller space. Though you're at home in that space " "On that stage," said the friend helpfully. "If you will," she said coolly. "That stage." Then she frowned. "Surely you're not reminding me that all the world's a stage?" "BUT HOW CAN you leave your place, which is here?" "My place, my place," she cried. "I have none!" "And you can't abandon your " "Friends?" she hooted. "Actually, Irena and I were thinking of your public." "Who says I am abandoning my public? Will they forget me if I choose to absent myself? No. Will they welcome me back should I choose to return? Yes. As for my friends ..." "Yes?" "You can be sure I have no intention of abandoning my friends." "MY FRIENDS," she repeated, "are much more dangerous than my enemies. I'm thinking of their approval. Their expectations. They want me to be as I am, and I cannot disabuse them entirely. They might cease to love me. "I've explained it to them. But I could have announced it to them, like a whim. Recently, I thought I was ready to do it. At dinner in a hotel, the party after a first-night performance. I was going to raise my glass. I am leaving. Soon. Forever. Someone would have exclaimed, Oh Madame, how can you? And I'd have replied, I can, I can. But I didn't have the courage. Instead, I offered a toast to our poor dismembered country." (Continues...) http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-1st-america. html Susan Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life January 30, 1978 By THE NEW YORK TIMES She didn't even have a doctor -- "I'd always been in excellent health," she shrugs -- and Susan Sontag made the appointment for herself as an afterthought while arranging a checkup for her son. Fortuitous timing, as it turned out: Not only did she have breast cancer, "but they said I'd have been dead in six months if I hadn't caught it." That was two years ago. In the meantime, Susan Sontag has, among other things, has a mastectomy and various follow-up operations; written another book (the provocative "On Photography," which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and last week won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism); undergone chemotherapy, started her third novel, and re-evaluated her whole life. Being Susan Sontag, a name regularly coupled with the description "the intellectual" (if not "the essayist," "the filmmaker" or "the novelist"), she has also put her critical mind to work on the matter at hand, and come up with a thoughtful treatise called "Illness as Metaphor." The work, which started out as a lecture and is now being converted into another book, deals with the cultural and literary associations that have long surrounded such potent diseases as cancer and tuberculosis. Her own first responses, Miss Sontag admits, were on a more visceral level: "Panic. Animal terror. I found myself doing very primitive sorts of things, like sleeping with the light on the first couple of months. I was afraid of the dark. You really do feel as though you're looking into that black hole." These days Miss Sontag, who turned 45 last week, neither looks nor sounds like a woman in the grip of terror. Tall, rangy and handsome, her coal-black hair streaked dramatically with silver, she exudes energy and warmth. Nonetheless, she makes a point of openness about her illness, "because it can be helpful to other people, and because it's very important to break the taboo. People are very reluctant to deal with the thought of death; they see it as some shameful secret, and to many people cancer equals death. I thought that, too. And I had to rethink everything -- what I thought, what I wanted to do." After considering such possibilities as abandoning routing and taking off for exotic, faraway places, Miss Sontag decided what she most wanted was just to continue her normal life: living with her son, David ("my best friend"), who at 25 is commuting to Princeton University, writing, going to movies, seeing friends. "For the first eight months, all I wanted was to be with loved ones and hold hands and talk. The entire first year I was thinking about death all the time, but in many ways it's been a positive experience," she said. "It has added a fierce intensity to my life, and that's been pleasurable. It sounds very banal, but having cancer does put things into perspective. It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you. That has somewhat receded now; more than two years have gone by, and I don't feel the same sort of urgency. In a way I'm sorry; I would like to keep some of that feeling of crisis." Despite a couple of later scares that the cancer might have spread, Miss Sontag's doctor announced cheerily not long ago: "Your actuarial prospects are sprucing up." "I laughed," she says, grinning. I laugh a lot, which is partly my black sense of humor, but also I think it is good to be in contact with life and death. Many people spend their lives defending themselves against the notion that life is melodrama. I think it is good not to damp down these conflicts and dramas and agonize. You get terrific energy from facing them in an active and conscious way. For me, writing is a way of paying as much attention as possible. In addition to living her illness -- and thus her life -- as fully as possible, Miss Sontag is concentrating on her fiction. She now says she regrets all the years spent writing the essays for which she became renowned on subjects ranging from the esthetics of camp to Cuba, Vietnam and political radicalism. Fierce intensity does not appear to be a new element in the life of Miss Sontag, who grew up in Arizona and California, where she attended "dreadful high school" where she was reprimanded for reading Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" instead of the assigned portion of Reader's Digest. She graduated from high school at 15, married at 17, graduated from the University of Chicago at 18 and went on to graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. Along the way she bore a son and began evolving the esthetic and political iconoclasm that became the hallmark of her work. Having cancer has prompted Miss Sontag to re-examine, among other things, her early and unhappy marriage to Philip Rieff, who is now a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is disturbed by current notions about a "cancer-prone character type: someone unemotional, inhibited, repressed." "I immediately thought, I'm exactly the type," she says with a laugh. "You look back on you life and think, I was married for eight years, why did I stay married that long; why was I a good student in school, maybe I was repressing my delinquent impulses; I repress my emotions! And then I realized, who doesn't? That's also called being civilized. I don't know a single person who doesn't repress emotions. How can you now, if you're educated and involved in mental activity that requires control, planning, routine? "But of course I identified with that profile, because those are the things we all fear now, that we're not expressive enough. That's the going psychological dogma, just as in the 19th century it was the opposite. But I don't believe emotions are the cause of disease." Among Miss Sontag's present emotions is "a little bit of glee," she concedes, looking pleased with herself. "I have this irrepressible optimism now that so far I'm getting away with it." Damocles over your head," Susan Sontag says with a gentle smile. "It's an important truth. Death is part of the dignity and seriousness of life." http://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/30/books/booksspecial/sontag-cancer.html Screen: 'Brother Carl' August 12, 1972 By ROGER GREENSPUN Brother Carl" is Susan Sontag's second movie. But it is the first movie in which she seems to see film as a means to life rather than as a repository for ideas. "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) really dealt with a kind of rarefied mental cannibalism. In a very open way, "Brother Carl" really deals with human relationships. Two women, Karen and Lena, visit an island, a Swedish resort, where Lena's ex-husband, Martin, lives in comparative seclusion with a mentally disturbed ballet dancer named Carl. Carl is brother by guild rather than blood, for Martin is somehow responsible for his breakdown, and Carl, who totally depends upon him, regards him as an enemy. Lena is young and full of life, and to some extent "Brother Carl" is the story of how she offers her life, first to Karen, then to Martin, and finally to Carl -- before committing it in total and apparently wasteful sacrifice. Karen is older and very tired, and to some extent the film is the story of how her life is saved by the enigmatic Carl, who forms a bond with her own desperately withdrawn young daughter, Anna, and effectively brings the girl out of her private distances and back into the world. I have greatly simplified the story, which is very complex and full of symbolic event and confrontation, and which is also a little foolish. In a sense, "Brother Carl" is all about learning to give, and its climactic "miracle" (Miss Sontag's word) is essentially to evoke laughter from a little girl. These suggest sentiments worthy of Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's, but that Miss Sontag is willing to treat them openly and seriously is, paradoxically, perhaps her greatest source of strength. There are a directness and an awkwardness of gesture and of larger movement in "Brother Carl" that count among its most attractive qualities, and that go a long way to compensate for its occasionally strained pretensions. It is a very imperfect film, with one bad performance (Genevieve Page as Karen) and several performances that seem to have been directed toward an excessive inexpressiveness. But I think that it indicates the taking of considerable imaginative and emotional risks, as "Duet for Cannibals" did not, and the result is a real movie. "Brother Carl" was filmed in Sweden with an English-language sound track. It opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater. http://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-carl.html --------------------------------- Susan Sontag's 'Duet for Cannibals' at Festival September 25, 1969 By ROGER GREENSPUN The special providence that protects movie critics decrees that when they do take up honest work they often make surprisingly good movies. Godard and Truffaut come to mind at once, but also a whole line of "Cahiers du Cinema" critics including Chabrol, Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. In America, we have Peter Bogdanovich ("Targets") and now Susan Sontag with "Duet for Cannibals," which played last night at the New York Film Festival. Miss Sontag's credits extend, of course, a considerable distance beyond movie criticism, but she has been one of the best of critics, and I have heard some of her colleagues remark, with disarming generosity, that she has proved herself so good at making movies you'd never guess she had written about them. Except for some bandages out of Godard, two wigs out of Antonioni, and a leading lady out of Bernardo Bertolucci (Adriana Asti, who is more interesting here than she was in "Before the Revolution"), "Duet for Cannibals" doesn't seem to owe much to anybody except to Miss Sontag and her own idiomatic, uncluttered sense of the medium. The film is in Swedish, made in Sweden for a Swedish producer, but the subtitles are Miss Sontag's, and I suspect that as much has been gained as lost in the various translations and transpositions required in realizing the project. The cannibals are a middle-age radical German political activist and the theoretician, Bauer -- Hans Erborg -- living with his young Italian wife Francesca -- Miss Asti -- in Sweden. Their victims are a young Swede who goes to work as Bauer's secretary, and his mistress, who eventually finds herself working as the Bauers's cook and companion. For all the movie tells us, Bauer's credentials are real enough (down to a chrome-plated cigarette lighter -- gift of Bertolt Brecht), but everything in his present life partakes of fraud calculated to intrigue, upset, and entrap his assistant. His erratic and violent behavior, the temptation palpably and leeringly offered of his beautiful young wife, eventually the intellectual challenge of what move he will make next, engage the young man and put him repeatedly off balance. Before it is all over the girl is at work too, making love to the master, accepting advances from the mistress, feeding and being fed by both of them, and lying between them in their connubial bed. There are too many insane people in the world, comments the young hero after he is attacked by a madman on a city street and of course he included the Bauers, who also attack -- and win -- because they try anything and stand by nothing. Nevertheless, I don't think "Duet for Cannibals" means to be a parable about the power of the insane over the sane, or the strong over the weak, or even the inventively absurd over the rational and passionate. I don't know what it does mean to be, and I am content for a while to rest with its moods and its complicated, often funny motions. But if the movie fails -- as I think it does -- to open up beyond the strength and the tact of its specific scenes, it invites that failure in the limitations of its own point of view and in its insistence on insoluble mystery to the point where mystery grows boring without getting less mysterious. The young couple's final escape offers relief of a rather low level -- mostly that the charade is over for them and us. The personal games increase in intensity, but nothing very much is at stake, and personality is never deeper than the next level of plausible disguise. "Duet for Cannibals" will be shown again at Alice Tully Hall on Friday at 6:30 P.M. http://www.nytimes.com/1969/09/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-duet.html --------------------------------- Screen: Sontag's 'Promised Lands' July 12, 1974 By NORA SAYRE Susan Sontag's film about Israel, "Promised Lands," which was made in October and November of 1973, isn't intended to be a documentary. However, that country's situation is just too factually complex to be treated as a tone poem. In an effort to eschew talking heads, there's a lot of voice-over narration, as people walk through the streets, but sometimes we don't know who's talking. There's some handsome photography -- especially of figures in landscapes -- although what's seen and what is said often don't go together, and many shots seem irrelevant. The movie opened yesterday at the First Avenue Screening Room. One's ready to be moved by the subject. But the viewer almost has to function as an editor, since the selection of the footage is so haphazard. Hence the emotions of or about Israel don't come through, even though glimpses of graveyards and corpses and the consciousness of Auschwitz, the lingering shock of the October attack and the awareness that the struggle between Arabs and Jews may be insoluble -- as one man says, "There's no solution to a tragedy" -- run through the marrow of the picture. Throughout, the ideas and the people and the machines of war are examined from a distance, as though everything had been observed through some kind of mental gauze. The Israelis -- particularly those in robes -- are filmed as if they were extremely foreign or exotic. Also, Israel seems like a nearly all-male country, since few women appear and none have been interviewed. There are a few sympathetic words for the Arabs, but their existence seems shadowy and abstract -- almost as bloodless as the statues in a wax museum devoted to Israeli history. Two scenes are particularly disturbing. At a mass burial, the camera rushes in on a weeping profile in a way that's intrusive -- because we've been given so little sense of the dead or even of the war. Later, in a hospital, a shell-shocked soldier relives his battlefield experiences under drugs, while a psychiatrist and the hospital staff recreate the noises of shooting and bombing. (This is said to be therapeutic for the patient. The staff looks as though it rather enjoys the task.) It should be devastating to watch this man burrow into the pillow, shudder, dive beneath the bed. But these moments have been filmed with such confusion that we can't respond to his suffering -- indeed, suffering's hardly conveyed in "Promised Lands." Because the movie is dull and badly organized, the war is made to seem unreal. Unlike Claude Lanzmann's very fine documentary, "Israel Why," which was shown at the 1973 New York Film Festival, the Sontag film won't increase your understanding of Israel. Perhaps the latter should have been a book instead of a film. http://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/12/books/booksspecial/sontag-lands.html --------------------------------- Novelist, radical Susan Sontag, 71, dies in New York Washington Times, 4.12.29 http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php From combined dispatches Susan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71. Mrs. Sontag died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The hospital did not release the cause of death, although Mrs. Sontag was first treated for breast cancer in the 1970s. Mrs. Sontag was 31 when her essay "Notes on 'Camp' " established her as a prominent critic. Her essays on art, culture and politics were published in influential journals, including the New York Review of Books. "The white race is the cancer of human history," she wrote in a 1967 essay in Partisan Review. "It is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." Such comments led novelist Tom Wolfe to dismiss Mrs. Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review." An outspoken admirer of communist revolutionaries, including Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mrs. Sontag was a fierce opponent of U.S. foreign policy. She angered many Americans in 2001 when, less than two weeks after the terrorist hijackings of September 11, she wrote an article that suggested the United States deserved to be attacked. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,' " Mrs. Sontag wrote, "but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of [the September 11] slaughter, they were not cowards." In 2000, Mrs. Sontag won the National Book Award for the historical novel "In America." Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, she later described her childhood as "one long prison sentence." Her father died when she was 5, and her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag. At age 17, she married social psychologist Philip Rieff, then 28, just 10 days after meeting him at the University of Chicago. The couple had a son, David, born in 1952, but divorced in the 1960s. In later years, she described her lesbian relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz as "an open secret." Ex-radical author David Horowitz noted yesterday that in 1969, he published the Sontag essay, "On the Right Way (For Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution" in Ramparts magazine. "There is no right way to love the Cuban Revolution. That was my second thought. It's a pity [Mrs. Sontag] never had second thoughts, too," Mr. Horowitz said. --------------- Telegraph: Susan Sontag http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/29/db2901.x ml&sSheet=/portal/2004/12/29/ixportal.html Susan Sontag (Filed: 29/12/2004) Susan Sontag, the American novelist and essayist who died yesterday aged 71, was a paragon of radical intelligence and austere beauty of whom it was said that, if she had not existed, the New York Review of Books would have had to invent her. Called "the most intelligent woman in America" by Jonathan Miller, Susan Sontag was a slow, unprolific writer who agonised over her work. In 25 years of grind, she produced six slender volumes of crafted essays. Published intially in popular magazines and periodicals, her work made intelligent criticism of modern culture acceptable and had a profound effect on future generations of authors, critics and journalists. Sontag's first essay, Notes on 'Camp' - an analysis of the preference of some people for tat rather than art - was published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Camp, she wrote, was a form of consumption that converted "bad" art such as comic strips into a source of refined pleasure, ignoring intention and relishing style. This sounded like an attack on elite culture, delivered with the skill and authority of someone well-educated in that culture. Added to her defence of such modernist icons as John Cage, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, it earned Susan Sontag the titles "Queen Camp" and "the Natalie Wood of the avant garde". In fact, Susan Sontag's favourite author was Shakespeare, and she was at pains to point out that she did not want to promote bleak modernism for its own sake. "All my work says be serious, be passionate; wake up," she said. "You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question." There were few strip cartoons in her own library. An avid reader from early childhood, she possessed a collection of 15,000 volumes and could talk fluently across the arts and humanities, on philosophy, literature, film, opera, neurology, psychology or church architecture. She always found time to read; she said that the memory of her drunken mother sleeping away her life provoked her to make do with four hours' sleep a night. Critics who denigrated her as "pseudo-intellectual" overlooked the fact that Susan Sontag employed her seriousness to defend the senses against the intellect. In Against Interpretation - the title of her first collection of essays published in 1966 - she damned Freudian and Marxist interpretation that "excavates; destroys; digs behind the text to find a subtext which is the true one". Interpretation destroyed energy and "sensual capability". It was the "revenge of intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of intellect upon the world." Despite her awesome abilities as a critic, Susan Sontag was at war with herself. In part, she wanted to be an unthinking, passionate artist. Early on she wrote two novels - The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) - but these were more intellectual than passionate. As she grew older, the need to express herself grew stronger. It was not until 1992 that she felt she had done herself justice with her novel The Volcano Lover, a heady mixture of intellect and eroticism, about the love triangle between William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Lord Nelson. The book was "released" in Susan Sontag after a conversation with her psychiatrist in which she discovered that her difficulty in writing a popular novel came from a fear that giving readers pleasure might seem trivial. "What worried me was that I would not be writing essays, because they have a powerful ethical impulse," she said. "But my psychiatrist said: 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to give people pleasure?'" Susan Sontag was born in Arizona on January 16 1933. Her father was a furrier with a business based in China, where he spent much of his time. Her mother, an alcoholic of great beauty, was so afraid of growing old that she forbade her daughters to call her "mother" in public. Susan and her sister lived most of their early childhood with an illiterate Irish nurse. When she was five, Susan's father died in China. Afterwards, her mother took to travelling a great deal. "I don't know where she went or what she did," Susan said. "I guess she had boyfriends.". The family became poor and moved to Los Angeles. Susan read books "to ward off the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromides I heard at home". By the age of seven she had read a six-volume edition of Les Mis?rables and had become a socialist. At 14 she took a schoolfriend to tea with Thomas Mann, then living in exile in Los Angeles. At Hollywood High, when Susan was 15, her principal told her that she had outstripped her teachers and sent her to Berkeley, from where she went to Chicago University. At 17 she married Philip Rieff, a lecturer in social theory 11 years her senior, after a 10-day courtship. She heard one student telling another that Rieff had married a "14-year old Indian". Rieff provided her with intellectual companionship. At Boston University he wrote about Freud while she took masters degrees in English and Philosophy and added an MA from Harvard. They had a son, David, but in 1958 the couple separated for a year when Sontag took up a fellowship at Oxford. There she was influenced by the teaching of Iris Murdoch and AJ Ayer, but found student life equally engrossing. "It was being young in a way I had never allowed myself to be," she recalled. On her return to America she divorced Rieff and set off for New York with her son, two suitcases and $70. Her lawyer told her she was the first woman in Californian history to have refused alimony. She taught at Columbia University while writing The Benefactor, and began working on the essays that would secure her reputation. In addition to Against Interpretation, she published the collections Styles Of Radical Will (1969); On Photography (1977); Illness As Metaphor (1978); Under The Sign Of Saturn (1980) and Aids and Its Metaphors (1989). She also wrote four films and appeared as herself in Zelig, Woody Allen's mock-documentary. The best of her essays conveyed dense thought in casual, almost thrown-away paragraphs and sentences. They were demanding in the same way that poetry is demanding; each learned reference was used as selectively as a poet might use images. Such pared-down elegance was the refined product of grim endeavour. An essay of a few thousand words took her six to nine months to write. "I've thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said, "30 or 40 drafts of each page." From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Sontag lived in Paris. In 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and returned to America. Ignoring the advice of American oncologists, she had radically high doses of chemotherapy for two and a half years; the odds were against her living. "I was terrified," she said. "Horrible grief. Above all, to leave my son. And I loved life so much. I was never tempted to say `that's it'. I love it when people fight for their lives." She never became rich from her writing, but was adept at securing grants and scholarships. In necessity, friends helped her out; the money for her cancer treatment was raised by Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. It was not until The Volcano Lover that she acquired an agent; and only in 1990, when she was awarded a handsome MacArthur fellowship, was she secure enough to buy her apartment in New York. Susan Sontag had a high political profile. She visited Hanoi during the Vietnam war (after which she described the white race as "the cancer of human history") and in 1993 she directed a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo when that city was under siege. She was a vociferous critic of the Soviet Union - particularly in its treatment of writers - and was president of PEN in 1987. Days after the attacks of September 11 2001, she criticised American foreign policy, referring to the terrorists' behaviour as "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions". She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Though known for her hauteur and not indifferent to her public image, Sontag avoided the "celebrity" circuit. Her highbrow attitude made enemies, foremost among them the American academic Camille Paglia, best-known for her enthusiasm for the pop singer Madonna. Paglia never forgave Sontag for snubbing her at a party in 1973. By the late 1980s she was declaring that her intellect had eclipsed Sontag's. "I've been chasing that bitch for 25 years," said Paglia, "and at last I've caught her." "We used to think Norman Mailer was bad," said Susan Sontag, "but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen." In 2000 she published a novel, In America, about the 19th century Polish actress Helena Modjeska. Although she was criticised for unauthorised use of source material, it won her the National Book Award. Susan Sontag never re-married, and her close relationships with several women provoked speculation; in 1999 she wrote an essay for Women, a compilation of portraits by her longtime friend, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. "I don't talk about my erotic life any more than I do my spiritual life," she said. "It is too complex and always ends up sounding so banal." She is survived by her son, David, whom she described as her "best friend". -------------------------- Guardian: Susan Sontag dies aged 71 http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5092982-103690,00.html Cultural critic called herself a 'zealot of seriousness' David Teather in New York and Sam Jones Wednesday December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, the writer and activist whose powerful intellect helped shape modern American thinking for nearly half a century, died yesterday at the age of 71. Sontag had described herself as a "zealot of seriousness", championing the avant-garde as well as dissecting contemporary ideas and mores. Her writings covered a wide range of subjects from pornography to the aesthetics of fascism and science fiction films. She had also called herself a "besotted aesthete" and an "obsessed moralist". She died of leukaemia in a specialist cancer centre in New York, the city she was born in. Her outspokenness enraged as much as it attracted admiration. She was attacked for visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam war and declaring "the white race is the cancer of human history"; more recently she caused many to bristle with her comments following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US. "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of (the) slaughter, they were not cowards," she said. Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, said: "She had had a particular resurgence over the last 10 years with her stand in criticism of the ongoing military activity in the world, whether from America or from the global growth in ethnic violence. "But long before that, she was one of the lone female Jewish voices to appear as some kind of authority in the shifting American cultural scene," she added. "She helped introduce the voices of those who had been outsiders in American society, like the Jews, and she became part of a new cutting edge cultural elite." Sontag, showered with awards during her career, wrote 17 books, first attracting attention and critical acclaim with her 1964 Notes on Camp. The book helped to introduce the notion that something can be "so bad it's good". "She was very clever at taking something that was part of a cultish interest - like the gay male - and turning it into her own interest," said the writer Andrea Dworkin. She penned four novels, winning the American National Book Award in 2000 for In America, a portrait of the nation on the cusp of modernity in the west of 1876. Her short story The Way We Live Now, published in 1987, was recently chosen for inclusion in an anthology titled The Best American Short Stories of the Century. The story charted the varying responses of a group of people in New York when they discover a close friend has Aids. Ms Sontag's impact, however, has been most keenly felt as an essayist. "The non-fiction was where she was strongest and it is the non-fiction that people will keep reading," said Dworkin. Her works included Illness as Metaphor, in which she condemned the trend of transferring responsibility of diseases such as cancer to the victim, making them feel they have brought the suffering on themselves. She wrote the essay after her own bout with cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg. After being diagnosed in 1976 she underwent a mastectomy and was pronounced free of the disease. She wrote and directed four films and penned the play Alice In Bed. Her most recent theatre work was a staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo. An impassioned human rights activist, she led campaigns on behalf of persecuted or imprisoned writers and helped galvanise support for Salman Rushdie after his Satanic Verses brought a fatwa from Iranian clerics. Sontag had a degree from the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard and Saint Anne's College, Oxford. -------------- Guardian: Susan Sontag http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093053-111261,00.html Obituary _________________________________________________________________ Susan Sontag The Dark Lady of American intellectual life, an aesthete who reorientated its cultural horizons Eric Homberger Wednesday December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, the "Dark Lady" of American intellectual life for over four decades, has died of cancer. She was 71. Sontag was a tall, handsome, fluent and articulate woman. She settled in New York, where she lived, off and on, after separating from her husband, the social thinker Philip Rieff, in 1959, and her career went stellar there. Sontag belonged to the small number of women writers and intellectuals, led by Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt and Elizabeth Hardwick, who gave New York life its brilliance, without becoming a "New York Intellectual". She regarded all provincialisms, of Paris, Oxford or New York, as uninteresting. Even America failed to engage her. "I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through." Her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation, published in 1966, was followed in 1969 by Styles Of Radical Will. Under The Sign Of Saturn appeared in 1980, and the long-awaited Where The Stress Falls in 2001. Her passions were for cinema (preferably European), photography, European writers and philosophers, and for aesthetic pronunciamentos of a particular pugnacity. Despite a brimming and tartly phrased political sensibility, she was fundamentally an aesthete. She offered a reorientation of American cultural horizons. On Style, the title essay in her first collection, plus Notes On Camp, set out an economy of culture which was moral without being moralistic, and began a radical displacement of heterosexuality. It was a gay sensibility that she interpreted, and that shaped her response to the visual arts. It was also the central focus of her emotional life. But she remained essentially private, and when she wrote about herself, there was always an element of self-distancing. In a culture expecting easy intimacies from its great figures, she was aloof, poised, posed: she was camera-friendly. But you never could claim to know Sontag, however much New York was alive with gossip about her loves, her ex-loves, her next book. She moved readily from references to philosophers, poets, literary theoreticians and film auteurs. Reviewers were, rightly, dazzled. Though she changed her mind repeatedly, it was always done with style and conviction. If you wanted to argue with Sontag, you had to enter into her work in terms of the way a stance, a position, made sense as an intervention. Sontag dismissed Leni Reifenstahl in 1975, after the photographer had put in decades of work on her rehabilitation - all of which were ruined by the cool brilliance of Sontag's analysis of the allure of fascism. "The color is black," she wrote in Fascinating Fascism, "the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." Her astringent attack against interpretation ("the project of interpretation is largely reactionary") carried an aesthete's preference for readers, or consumers, to leave works of art alone, not to seek to replace them with something else. This was not a view that found favour among Deconstructionists, but Sontag was indifferent to the corporate earnestness of Yale or Harvard. Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, she was the daughter of a fur trader. When he died in 1938, her mother Mildred, and sister Judith (who suffered from asthma) left New York in search of warmer weather. Settling in Miami, and then Tucson, Arizona, they arrived in Los Angeles in 1945 when Mildred married army captain Nathan Sontag. Susan was never formally adopted, though she took his name. She had a deeply solitary and precocious childhood. Intimacy was not the Sontag family style, and she grew up without a gift for small talk, and little gaiety. There was little encouragement to the life of the mind. At North Hollywood high, she was remembered for her style and self-confidence. Sontag attended the University of California, Berkeley, for a semester, before in 1949, at the age of 16, she was admitted to the University of Chicago, where she formed strong bonds with teachers including critic Kenneth Burke and political philosopher Leo Strauss, intellectual father of the current neoconservatives. Sontag had a gift for cultivating men of influence and intellectual power. Later, at Harvard, Paul Tillich became her mentor. But it was a younger teacher at the University of Chicago, sociologist Philip Rieff, whom she married. As a 17-year-old sophomore she walked into his class on Kafka, late. He asked for her name when the class ended. Ten days they were married. Their son David, a writer, was born in 1952. She moved with Rieff to Boston after graduating in 1951. Their marriage had intense conversations but little intimacy. Sontag took a master's degree in philosophy at Harvard, and in 1957 won a fellowship to study for a year at St Anne's College, Oxford. She hated Oxford's sexism, and by Christmas had relocated to Paris, falling in with the expatriate American community around the Paris Review. She met the writer Alfred Chester, who introduced her to Robert Silvers. He provided Sontag with an incomparable platform when the New York Review of Books was launched in 1963. In Paris, Sontag made serious efforts to engage with French film-making, philosophy and writing. Returning to America in 1958, and met by Rieff at the airport, she told him before they got into the car that she wanted a divorce. Reclaiming her son, who had been living with Rieff's parents, she declined Rieff's offers of child support or alimony, moved into a small apartment, took an editorial job on Commentary, and wrote furiously. A self-conscious first novel, The Benefactor (1963) in the nouveau roman style, was accepted by Robert Giroux. Roger Straus, the senior partner of the publishers Farrar, Straus & Giroux, took her under his wing, kept her novels in print (The Death Kit appeared in 1967), and acted as literary impresario. She was invited to the important parties, and appeared regularly in leading literary journals. In 1965 she remarked, in a Partisan Review symposium, that "the white race is the cancer of human history". The age of radical chic had arrived, and Sontag - serious, gorgeous, striding across New Yorkintellectual life, was its most striking adornment. In 1968, indignant at the US role in Vietnam, she visited Hanoi, and published an account of it, Trip To Hanoi. In the early 1970s, Sontag began to write about photog raphy, in a series of essays in the New York Review of Books. She was gripped by the problems, principally aesthetic, of interpreting images. The further she explored, the stronger became her doubts about whether photographs gave what they seemed to be delivering: a slice of truth, a piece of reality. In a gesture of immense self-confidence, her book On Photography (1977) did not contain a single photograph as specimen or illustration. She later returned to many of its themes in Regarding The Pain Of Others (2003), a thinner book, perhaps more directly shaped by her life as a public person, giving learned lectures to large audiences. Many of the most provocative arguments of On Photography were abandoned in the later book. Her studies of languages of illness, Illness As Metaphor, (1978) and AIDS And Its Metaphors (1989) were writ ten under the shadow of her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, for which she sought experimental therapy in Paris. In 1998 she was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer, from which she has died. In her studies of language and illness, she sought to remove the second punishment, of blame, that the metaphors of illness sustain. Her career as a novelist came full circle in 1992, when she published Volcano Lover, and In America, winner of the National Book award in 2000. Drawing on historical sources, and written with little of the spirit of her earlier novels, they brought her to a wider readership, but did not have much of the provocative rigour of her essays. Her son survives her. Susan Sontag, writer, born January 16 1933; died December 28 2004 ------------------ Guardian: 'A courageous and unique thinker' http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093065-111261,00.html Wednesday December 29, 2004 There were tributes yesterday to Susan Sontag from fellow writers and academics: Margaret Atwood, writer: "She was a unique and courageous woman. Even if you didn't agree with her, she was always courageous and always a unique thinker. She always made you think. What made her unique? She wasn't like anyone else. "Whatever she set her mind to - whatever she'd come up with - it wasn't going to be the received opinion. She ran received opinion through the shredder and looked at things again. She was a grown-up emperor's new clothes child. When kids say the emperor's naked, you tell them they shouldn't say those things in public. When adults say it, they get in a lot of trouble - and she didn't mind getting into trouble." Lisa Jardine, professor of English and dean of the faculty of arts at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge: "It's the end of an era for women. She will leave behind an incredible legacy - everything from self-fulfilment to the morality, or lack of morality, of illness. And I think it will be an all-round legacy. The essays fill out the fiction." Andrea Dworkin, writer: "She did phenomenal work on the camera and how it looks at people, and made a very fine film about Israel and Palestine. But she also wrote several novels that she wanted to be taken seriously as art. I think the fact that they weren't was a consequence of her being a woman." Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck college: "She helped introduce the voices of those who had been outsiders in American society, like the Jews, and she became part of a new cutting-edge cultural elite. "She wasn't strongly identified with feminism until much later on because, like many mid-century women, she was ambivalent about it. Many feminists would probably have been suspicious of her stand, but she softened as she aged and talked about the vulnerability of illness and of ageing itself." Elizabeth Wurtzel, writer: "She got to have that kind of life where she could write essays for both academics and normal people. I think her passing is very sad for what she was, as much as for what she wrote. "I think it's her essays that she will be remembered for, but I always liked her fiction. It's not about whether her essays were better than her fiction; it's about the fact that she was able to do both." ---------------------- Guardian: A fighter armed with a pen http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5093064-111261,00.html Sam Jones Wednesday December 29, 2004 To some she was "a political pilgrim", to others a "liberal lioness", but there was never debate about Susan Sontag's first love: the written word. Born in New York in January 1933, she spent her formative years in Arizona and Los Angeles poring over Shakespeare, Hopkins, Hugo, Poe and Mann. However, it was only after reading Jack London's Martin Eden that she decided to become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." At 16 she began studying at the University of Chicago, where she met and married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old social theory lecturer. They had a son, David, when she was 19 but divorced in 1959 Her studies took her on to Harvard and then Oxford, laying the foundations of what she later termed "probably the best university education on the planet". Sontag wrote novels, non-fiction books, plays and film-scripts as well as essays. From 1987 to 1989 she was president of the Pen American Centre, the writers' organisation, where she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers. Salman Rushdie, the current Pen president, expressed his gratitude for her backing over the fatwa issued against him in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses. "Her resolute support, at a time when some wavered helped to turn the tide against what she called 'an act of terrorism against the life of the mind'." She caused outrage after the 9/11 attacks by writing in the New Yorker: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilisation' or 'liberty' or 'humanity or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" ----------------------- Guardian: Snap judgments http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4704477-110428,00.html James Fenton on how Susan Sontag has adjusted her thinking on photography James Fenton Saturday July 5, 2003 I was surprised to read this, in Susan Sontag's admirable essay on war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others: "Only starting with the Vietnam war is it virtually certain that none of the best-known photographs were set-ups." I don't say this certainty is misplaced. But the thought surprised me. In earlier days, participants seem to have thought nothing of, for instance, "reconstructing" the famous moment of the raising of the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima, for the sake of the camera. But Sontag suggests that photographers are now "being held to a higher standard of journalistic probity". And she adds that, since the arrival of television crews on the battlefield, "the witnessing of war is now hardly ever a solitary venture". And "the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art". What surprised me was the notion that this raising of journalistic standards had its origin in Vietnam - in, as the context makes clear, the practice of American and other western photographers. It is the western news editors and picture desks who must have pressed for a harsh ban on staged news photographs. It is they who must have made faking it a sacking offence. The North Vietnamese, during this period, were not in the least associated with that sort of realism in their photojournalism. Anything that came out of North Vietnam would have been carefully weighed for its propaganda value, and that included a 1950s documentary on Dien Bien Phu in which the French prisoners of war were made to re-enact their moment of surrender for the sake of the film cameras. Sometimes an event can really have taken place, and yet the photograph of it can turn into a deception. In the Philippines, during the revolution that overthrew President Marcos in 1986, a handsome young priest in a white soutane stood with his arms outstretched in the middle of a road, supposedly defying the tanks. He was facing the setting sun, and the beautiful image was widely used. My Filipino photographer colleagues used to laugh at this photograph which, when you saw it in all its glory, clearly showed in the foreground the lengthened shadows of a row of photographers and cameramen who must have been standing between the priest and the "tanks", which were anyway rather less than tanks and more like armoured cars. The photograph, to my friends, showed an exhibitionist putting on a display of defiance for the sake of the press. (My friends were envious, of course, not to have taken the snap themselves.) Sontag discusses the famous photograph from the Tet offensive in Saigon, 1968, in which General Loan executes a Vietcong prisoner, with a single shot to the temple. In a sense, as she says, this photograph too was staged, since Loan led the prisoner out on to the street where the journalists were gathered, and would not, she believes, "have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it". The general was making an example of the prisoner. Neil Davies, a famous cameraman in his day (who ended by filming his own death on the streets of Bangkok, during an abortive coup) told me a curious anecdote about this notorious incident. If you watch the film of this execution, you believe that what you see is a man screwing up his face in anticipation of death, another man firing the shot, the blood pouring from the head wound and the body slumping to the ground. You think you witness a complete execution, and this is both horrible and a kind of initiation. But in fact at the moment the shot was fired someone stood between the cameraman (whose name I forget) and the victim, blocking the view for a few seconds. When the film was processed in the studio, the offending moment soon hit the cutting-room floor. Spliced together, the footage was utterly remarkable. The subliminal jerkiness resulting from the cut moment is a part of what makes you think: this is what it is like to be killed, this is how fragile the body is, how powerfully the force of the shot pushes it to one side. You think this is the ultimate reality. But reality has been tidied up for you in this important respect. Regarding the Pain of Others was written in part out of an argument with the author's former self, with certain passages in that famous earlier book, On Photography, in which Sontag wrote, for instance, that "concerned" photography had "done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it". Our capacity to respond to images of suffering was being, on that view, "sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images". But this time around, Sontag has her own experience of Sarajevo very much in mind, and she particularly dislikes a kind of "fancy rhetoric" that downplays the reality of war and pretends that everything has turned into spectacle. Reality is not to be downplayed in this way. At the heart of the issues concerning photography and conscience there are real people, actually suffering. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," she says, "is breath-taking provincialism." Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag, is published by Hamish Hamilton on August 7 --------------------- Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Observer review: Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121, 1011239,00.html What the eye can't see... A censorious Susan Sontag reproves our lust for horrific images in her second book on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others Peter Conrad Sunday August 3, 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag Hamish Hamilton ?12.99, pp128 This is Susan Sontag's second book on photography and, like the first, published in 1977, it contains no photographs. Omission or suppression? Sontag is concerned with photography's prurient intrusiveness, its surreal dislocation of reality, its irrelevant aestheticism. Actual photographs are of less interest to her, and are mentioned, in stern verbal paraphrase, only to be reproved for their untrustworthiness. Her earlier book concluded with a call for 'an ecology of images', censuring and perhaps censoring the visual stimuli with which a consumerist society assaults us. She remembers that resonant, impotent demand in Regarding the Pain of Others, and admits that it will never happen. No 'Committee of Guardians' is going to reform news media that enjoy disaster, gloat over horror and operate on the principle that 'If it bleeds, it leads'. Those media have trained us only too well, and we now instinctively transform an intolerable, unintelligible reality into fiction. People who watched the planes slice through the World Trade Centre, or witnessed the collapse of the towers, agreed that the scene was 'unreal' and compared it with an action movie; the Pentagon caters to this craving for scenarios that are apocalyptic but ultimately harmless by deciding in advance on blockbusting titles for its wars, such as Operation Desert Storm. Sontag retells the familiar stories about photographs that sanitise or falsify the conflict they are supposed to be documenting. In the Crimea, Roger Fenton represented war as a 'dignified all-male outing', avoiding all evidence of carnage: in the valley through which the Light Brigade charged, he supervised the placing of cannonballs on the road. In 1945, the Russian victors hoisting the Red Flag over the Reichstag in Berlin took direction from a Soviet war photographer who dreamt up this iconic moment. Having been drip-fed fantasies and outright lies, how can we properly respond to the remote, exotic miseries on which photographic journalists report? In our 'culture of spectatorship', have we lost the power to be shocked? The pain of others titillates us, so long as it is kept at a safe distance. The victims of famine and massacre are always, as Neville Chamberlain dismissively said of the Poles, people we do not know; when genocide recurred during the Bosnian war, we were reminded that the Balkans should not be considered part of Europe. The young Afghan refugee photographed by Steve McCurry for National Geographic became, a poster girl for atrocity; we could see her pain but not feel it. Sontag blames the eyes' indiscriminate lust, claiming 'the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked'. Her book, unillustrated, caters to neither hunger (though she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the perverse philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal, while being chopped up and slowly flayed by executioners, rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss). Words are Sontag's antidote to images. Hence her argument that the war photographs of Robert Capa or David Seymour belong in newspapers, where they are 'surrounded by words', rather than in magazines, which juxtapose them with glossy advertising images: the explanatory verbiage is a bulwark, and turns the fickle viewer into a reflective, questioning reader. If you ask me, she has too much faith in the veracity of scribbling hacks. I'm also unconvinced by her contention that images can easily be conscripted as the 'totems of causes', because 'sentiment is more likely to crystallise around a photograph than around a verbal slogan'. Again, her self-denying ordinance prevents her showing any evidence. Before photography, revolutions were instigated by verbal slogans, contagiously chanted by crowds: 'No Taxation without Representation' in 1776, or 'Libert?, Egalit?, Fraternit?' in 1789. Sontag gives us nothing to look at, so I cannot see that anything has changed. At the end of the book, she proposes that 'photographs with the most solemn or heart-rending subject matter' - Matthew Brady's dead soldiers from the Civil War, the walking cadavers at Buchenwald and Dachau photographed by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller, perhaps also Nicholas Nixon's Aids victims - should not be exhibited in galleries or museums, where like 'all wall-hung or floor-supported art' they become incidental to a stroll, displayed as if they were plates on a sushi railway which we can sample or ignore as we please. The 'weight and seriousness' of images like these is more aptly honoured privately in sober silence, she believes, in a book. I hope she does not mean the book - or booklet - she has written. Regarding the Pain of Others is serious enough, but hardly weighty. It is short, and by rights should be a good deal shorter: it derives from an Amnesty lecture, and labours to amplify and relentlessly repeat its original argument. Perhaps I am not being entirely just to a writer I usually admire. The book, I should admit, does contain a single photograph. You can find it on the inside back flap of the jacket, and it shows Sontag herself - a mater dolorosa whose grieving face is framed by a sleek cascade of time-defying jet-black hair - posed next to a wall beside the Seine near the Ile de la C?t?. The photographer is her close friend, Annie Leibovitz, who specialises in the glamorous consecration of celebs for the covers of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. In her starchy text, Sontag says that 'beautifying is one classic operation of the camera', and regrets the vanity of people who are 'always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering'. By including Leibovitz's portrait, she has exempted herself from her own rule. Do her 30,000 words really balance or outweigh the missing images? It all depends on how you regard the vanity of others, or how much pain you want to cause by telling the truth. -------------------------- WP: Cultural Author, Activist Was a Fearless Thinker http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31194-2004Dec28?language=print er By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page A01 Susan Sontag, 71, the American intellectual who engaged and enraged equally with her insights into high and low culture, died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She had leukemia. Philosophy, photography, pornography -- Sontag explored them all with a defiant gusto, informed by an impressive, if lofty, ability to transcend cultural barriers with a barrage of literary and cultural references. She was not averse to self-promotion and indicated that she was one of the few writers able to survive as an essayist. Her books seldom went out of print and were translated into more than 25 languages. She spoke five. Reading by age 3, having tea and cookies with author and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann at 14 and graduating from college at 18, she went on to a long career as a provocateur through dozens of novels and nonfiction works. Cumulatively, they placed her among the foremost thinkers about the meaning of art, politics, war, silence and humanity. She wrote movingly but unsentimentally about her own experiences with cancer -- of the breast at age 43 and the uterus decades later -- and how disease is portrayed in popular culture. Her essay "Illness as Metaphor" (1978) is considered her classic exploration of the subject. Tall, raven-haired with a streak of white, with bold dark eyes and a wry smile, Sontag was a recognizable figure in the mainstream media firmament through lectures and televised debates. She shoved herself to the forefront of contemporaneous debate with her activism against the Vietnam War -- including a trip to Hanoi -- and later denunciations of Communism as stifling the work of intellectuals. Along the way, she raised her voice against authoritarian -- and sometimes democratic -- leaders around the world. In the early 1990s, she staged Samuel Beckett's existential masterpiece "Waiting for Godot" in Sarajevo amid bombing and sniper fire. Sontag won the National Book Award for fiction in 2000 for "In America," about a 19th-century Polish actress who moves to California to start a new life. The author also received a MacArthur "genius" grant, among other honors. Much of her early distinction arose in the 1960s with her advocacy of European artists and thinkers, including philosophers Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Occasionally, she caused palpitations among the fervently patriotic for her less-nuanced commentary, to the effect that "America is founded on genocide" and "the quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth." More recently, she wrote in the New Yorker about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, denouncing the use of the word "cowardly" to describe the attackers. "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of the . . . slaughter, they were not cowards," she wrote. Those declarations were easy fodder for those ready to scorn her as anti-American or a liberal scourge. Time magazine made her a pop celebrity in 1964 when it noted her Partisan Review essay, "Notes On 'Camp,' " in which she plunged into the world of urban and mostly homosexual style. Mentioning the ballet "Swan Lake" along with the fashion accouterment of feather boas, she wrote that camp style is "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. . . . The ultimate camp statement: it's good because it's awful." But her work appeared largely in literary journals, including the New York Review of Books. She was elevated to near-sainthood by her admirers, who considered her an unstoppable literary force and crystalline thinker. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Susan Walker described Sontag's career as "marked by a seriousness of pursuit and a relentless intelligence that analyzes modern culture on almost every possible level: artistic, philosophical, literary, political, and moral." But she also was lampooned for the headiness of her writing. In a backhanded tribute to her influence in popular culture, the baseball catcher played by Kevin Costner in the 1988 film "Bull Durham" calls her handful of novels "self-indulgent, overrated crap." Sontag's own motivations were simple, she said: to "know everything." She had a lusty devotion to reading that she likened to the pleasure others get from watching television. "So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, appreciate and am tuned in better because I've read Nietzsche," she told Rolling Stone magazine. "The main reason I read is that I enjoy it." Susan Rosenblatt was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York, the older daughter of a traveling fur trader and an alcoholic teacher. She was raised in Tucson and Los Angeles and was largely left alone as a young girl, she later told an interviewer. Raised by a nanny in her parents' absences, she was 5 when her mother came back from China alone. Her father had died of tuberculosis, and her mother revealed the truth months later only after the girl pressed for details about his return. She took the surname Sontag from her stepfather. Sontag described a girlhood bereft of playmates. Instead, she devoured Djuna Barnes, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Jack London. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." She met Thomas Mann after reading the German author's 1924 novel "The Magic Mountain," set in a European sanitarium. On a second read, she spoke the words aloud and was so enthused about the book that she conspired with a friend to meet the author, then living in Los Angeles in exile during the Nazi era. "He seemed to find it perfectly normal that two local high school students should know who Nietzsche and [composer Arnold] Schoenberg were," she wrote in a New Yorker account of the visit. Her stepfather warned her that being so interested in books would make her uninteresting to men. "I just couldn't stop laughing," she once said. "I thought, 'Oh gosh, this guy's a perfect jerk.' " Before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, she married Philip Rieff, a sociologist 10 years her senior whom she would divorce in 1959. They had a son, David Rieff of New York, who survives, along with Sontag's sister. After Chicago, Sontag received master's degrees in English and philosophy from Harvard University and did all but her dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy. Her first book, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (1959), was completed in collaboration with her husband. They agreed, however, to put only his name on the title page. Still, she described this time as liberating. She was 26, divorced and ready to experience what she described as a delayed adolescence filled with dance lessons, discussions with politically motivated young people and a desire to make a literary mark. She taught religion at Columbia University before completing her first novel, "The Benefactors" (1963), the study of a dreamy rogue named Hippolyte who soon cannot tell reality from his own imagination. It impressed reviewers, and she began cornering magazine editors, sometimes at cocktail parties, about publishing her work. Her analysis, for the Nation magazine, of Jack Smith's erotically flamboyant film "Flaming Creatures" (1963) brought her attention as an enthusiastic filmwatcher but caustic observer of American morality, which she saw as preventing a full-blown appreciation of the film's "aesthetic vision." Her early essays, including "Notes on 'Camp,' " were collected in "Against Interpretation" (1966), her first major nonfiction book. She argued against critics who hunted for heady significance in a work of art at the expense of its sensual impact. "In most modern instances," she wrote, "interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art." As a radical and incisive thinker, she protested and wrote against the Vietnam War, visiting Hanoi to understand the motivations of the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. military. She began examining the presentation of disease in popular culture after her diagnosis of cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg and was given a 20 percent chance of survival. She underwent a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy that cured her of the cancer. In "Illness as Metaphor" and her book "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989), as well as countless interviewers, she condemned the idea of illness as a curse or plague, somehow a metaphor for social, cultural or moral decay. Illness is simply fact, she said. Despite other health conditions, she remained productive, producing a best-selling novel, "The Volcano Lover" (1992), about Lord Nelson and his mistress, Lady Hamilton. She spent much of her life in transit, living in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere while maintaining a home in what she considered the only livable spot in the United States -- New York. "And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners," she said. A restless voyager into the 1990s, she staged "Waiting for Godot" in Sarajevo. Even those who best understood her questioned her sanity to thrust herself into a war zone for the sake of art. "I didn't think I was invulnerable, because I had a couple of very close calls, and I don't think I'm a thrill-seeker," she said. "I just thought it's okay to take risks, and if ever I get to the point when I don't, then take me to the glue factory." ----------------------- WP: Thinking Woman http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32435-2004Dec28?language=print er Susan Sontag Was An Irresistible Force Among Intellectuals By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 29, 2004; Page C01 I first saw Susan Sontag in a New York bodega near the corner of 103rd Street and Broadway. This was in 1969. My God, I thought, that's Susan Sontag, the most public of our public intellectuals -- though perhaps not the most intellectual of them, if you listened to her critics. And there she was, studying the ice cream case with a calm, judgmental ferocity -- a tall woman with long, thick hair. She looked strong, for an intellectual, strong and big-chinned to the point of a slight mannishness that I did not hold against her -- androgyny being a sort of psychological beauty spot that can heighten the allure of the woman possessing it. I believe she wore a very long scarf that signaled her citizenship in bohemia. She was almost, but not quite, what I was shopping for in a woman. I thought of speaking to her, of saying something like: "What are you doing in this grungy neighborhood when you're supposed to be down in the Village sipping wine beneath someone's groaning bookshelves; with Cream on the turntable, and blended scents of cat pee, pipe smoke and marijuana in the air; and you talking about the gay-driven fashion of facetiousness you described in the essay that made you famous: "Notes on Camp"? She extracted a few pints of Haagen-Dazs, I think it was, from the cooler. Good taste in ice cream. I wanted to ask her if it was true she didn't own a television. I wanted to ask her about her writing, but I'd read so little of it. I wanted to ask her if she was as stoned as I was. I didn't ask her anything. She paid for her ice cream (Oh if I could only remember the flavors! Rum raisin? She seemed like a secondary-flavor type who would eschew the primary chocolate, strawberry and vanilla -- with a slight chance that she would eat only vanilla, for its minimalist authenticity.) I watched her out the door and sighed to myself: "There it is: my Susan Sontag moment." Why did I care so much? Would I have gotten as worked up if I'd shared a bodega with Hannah Arendt or Alfred Kazin? Sontag, who died Tuesday at the age of 71, had the gift of fame, which is to say she possessed charisma, which may be why she ended up being called overrated, the fate of charismatic people. I had read more about her than by her. An Internet biography site quotes the cranky Hilton Kramer in the Atlantic Monthly: "She was admired not only for what she said but for the pain, shock, and disarray she caused in saying it. Sontag thus succeeded in doing something that is given to very few critics to achieve. She made criticism a medium of intellectual scandal, and this won her instant celebrity in the world where ideas are absorbed into fashions and fashions combine to create a new cultural atmosphere." Also quoted is Commentary essayist Alicia Ostriker, saying that Sontag was "distinguished less by a decided or passionate point of view -- than by an eagerness to explore anything new." She concluded: "Sensitive people are a dime a dozen. The rarer gift Miss Sontag has to offer is brains." Sontag wrote essays about Sartre and novels about the nature of consciousness. She had a taste for the crepuscular haunts of the psyche. After a struggle with breast cancer she wrote one of her most talked-about books, "Illness as Metaphor," about how we make far-fetched meaning out of illness and blame people for their diseases. Another was "On Photography," the most morbid of our art forms. Critic Robert Hughes is quoted as saying: "It is hard to imagine any photographer agreeing point for point with Sontag's polemic. But it is a brilliant, irritating performance, and it opens window after window on one of the great faits accomplis of our culture. Not many photographers are worth a thousand of her words." Denis Donoghue said in the New York Times Book Review: "Her mind is powerful rather than subtle; it is impatient with nuances that ask to be heard, with minute discriminations that, if entertained, would impede the march of her argument." She won prizes, wandered into moviemaking and playwriting, and wrote about science fiction and pornography. Also, she was profiled in Rolling Stone and People magazines, she posed for an ad for Absolut vodka and she appeared in films by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen. I kept reading about her changes of mind, changes made with a blitheness concealed by her conspicuous gravitas: changes on communism (good, bad), Hitler's staff photographer, Leni Riefenstahl (good, bad). In a speech at Town Hall in 1982, delivered to an audience of New York intellectuals, she had the deftness to insert the knife between their panting, left-leaning ribs and then twist it with: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" Oh, the broadsides against her! And the counter-broadsides! In my mind, at least, she metamorphosed from intellectual flavor-of-the-month to anti-Vietnam war provocateur to a template for the life of the mind. (I read somewhere recently that she had acquired a television but never watched it.) Gradually, she calcified into an icon, a sort of walking statue who didn't so much go to parties as appear at them. As for me, I gradually had gotten into the criticism game, and in 1998, I found myself at the 35th anniversary party of the New York Review of Books, in the atrium of the Frick mansion in Manhattan. I hoped -- I knew -- she'd be there. She was -- with a magnificent stripe of white through her still-long hair. (I read that she later switched to a Gertrude Stein crew cut.) She swanned through the crowd of intellectual superstars, projecting what only Queen Elizabeth II had conveyed before to me: "Do not speak to me unless I speak to you first." I obeyed. Everybody seemed to obey. I'm not sure I saw her talk with anyone, though she must have. In any case, I saw that no one has ever or will ever do a better job of being Susan Sontag. Maybe she didn't deserve all the laurels that came with that high station, but she was, in fact, Susan Sontag, an epitome of her age, what cultural historians call a "modal personality," a woman who thought hard and wrote even harder. I wanted to ask her, "You probably don't remember, but in 1969 you were buying ice cream in a bodega at 103rd and Broadw. . . " I forbore. There was nothing that I wanted to talk to her about, and there hadn't been two decades before. I just wanted her to be Susan Sontag. Maybe I wanted her to want to talk to me, but I realized with a wistful realism that there was no reason she would. There we were, ships that once passed in the fluorescent night of a bodega. Maybe if I'd just handed her a pint of Haagen-Dazs rum raisin, and walked away. Maybe vanilla. ----------------------- Los Angeles Times: Ardent Author, Activist, Critic Dies at 71 http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-sontag29dec29,1,5996360,pri nt.story?coll=la-news-obituaries SUSAN SONTAG / 1933-2004 Ardent Author, Activist, Critic Dies at 71 Intensely curious and intellectual, she long challenged conventional thinking in her writing. By Steve Wasserman Times Staff Writer December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag, one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died Tuesday of leukemia at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, according to her son, David Rieff. She was 71. The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of "Notes on Camp," written for Partisan Review and included in "Against Interpretation," her first collection of essays, published two years later. Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as crafting portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti. Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform. "We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. "In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying." In a Rolling Stone article in 1979, Jonathan Cott called Sontag a writer who was "continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other -- much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one's touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving." A self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist," Sontag sought to challenge conventional thinking. "From the moment I met Susan Sontag in 1962, I felt myself to be in the presence of a woman of astonishing intelligence and the most exemplary literary passions," novelist Carlos Fuentes told The Times on Tuesday. "I admired her work and her life without reservation." She was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5. She was a graduate of North Hollywood High School and attended UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago -- which she entered when she was 16 -- and Harvard and Oxford. In 1950, while at the University of Chicago, she met and 10 days later married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor in social theory. Two years later, at age 19, she had a son, David, now a prominent writer. She divorced in 1959 and never remarried. Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the adventure-travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." "I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all." She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom." Edgar Allan Poe's stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London's "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations." At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann's masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run," she said. "After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night." Not long after, she and a friend visited Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades. Many decades later, she recalled the visit vividly, in a memoir published by the New Yorker, as an encounter between "an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile." Over cookies and tea, while smoking one cigarette after another, Mann spoke of Wagner and Hitler, of Goethe and "Doctor Faustus," his newest book. "He seemed to find it perfectly normal that two local high school students should know who Nietzsche and Schoenberg were," she wrote. He went on to talk about "the value of literature" and "the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity." But what struck Sontag most were the "books, books, books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered two of the walls" of his study. She began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature -- buying when I could, stealing when I dared." She also became a "militant browser" of the international periodical and newspaper stand near the "enchanted crossroads" of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where she discovered the world of literary magazines. She was fond of recounting how, at 15, she had bought a copy of Partisan Review and found it impenetrable. Nevertheless, "I had the sense that within its pages ... momentous issues were at stake. I wanted desperately to crack the code." At 26, she moved to New York City where, for a time, she taught the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. At a cocktail party, she encountered William Phillips, one of Partisan Review's legendary founding editors and asked him how one might write for the journal. He replied, "All you have to do is ask." "I'm asking," she said. Soon Sontag's provocative essays on Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Jasper Johns and even the Supremes began to spice Partisan Review's pages. Sontag recoiled at what she regarded as the artificial boundaries separating one subject, or one art form, from another. She devoted herself to demolishing "the distinction between thought and feeling ... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment.... Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking." Her quest was admired by such writers as Elizabeth Hardwick, a founder of the New York Review of Books, whose editors quickly embraced Sontag. In her introduction to "A Susan Sontag Reader," Hardwick called her "an extraordinarily beautiful, expansive and unique talent." Others were less impressed. John Simon accused Sontag of "a tendency to sprinkle complication into her writing" and of tossing off "high-sounding paradoxes without thinking through what, if anything, they mean." Greil Marcus called her "a cold writer" whose style was "an uneasy combination of academic and hip ... pedantic, effete, unfriendly." Walter Kendrick found her fiction "dull and derivative." In 1976, at 43, Sontag discovered she had advanced cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg. She was told she had a one-in-four chance to live five years. After undergoing a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was pronounced free of the disease. "My first reaction was terror and grief. But it's not altogether a bad experience to know you're going to die. The first thing is not to feel sorry for yourself," she said. She set about to learn as much as possible about the disease. She later wrote "Illness as Metaphor," an influential essay condemning the use of tuberculosis and cancer as metaphors that transfer responsibility for sickness to the victims, who are made to believe they have brought suffering on themselves. Illness, she insisted, is fact, not fate. Years later, she would extend the argument in the book-length essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors." An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent." In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone -- its ideologies and inventions -- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." Considering herself neither a journalist nor an activist, Sontag felt an obligation as "a citizen of the American empire" to accept an invitation to visit Hanoi at the height of the American bombing campaign in May 1968. A two-week visit resulted in a fervent essay seeking to explain Vietnamese resistance to American power. Critics excoriated her for what they regarded as a naive sentimentalization of Vietnamese communism. Author Paul Hollander, for one, called Sontag a "political pilgrim," bent on denigrating Western liberal pluralism in favor of venerating foreign revolutions. That same year, Sontag also visited Cuba, after which she wrote an essay for Ramparts magazine calling for a sympathetic understanding of the Cuban revolution. Two years later, however, she joined Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers in publicly protesting the regime's harsh treatment of Heberto Padilla, one of the country's leading poets. She also denounced Fidel Castro's punitive policies toward homosexuals. Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left's refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin's terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed. Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she called for vigorous Western -- and American -- intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo prompted her to make more than a dozen trips to the besieged city. Then, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism. Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and Germany's Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Accepting the prize from Jerusalem's mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean, of course, the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians...." In late March 2004, she was found to have a condition that, if left untreated, would be fatal: a pre-acute leukemia that doctors concluded was a consequence of chemotherapy she had undertaken to rid herself of a uterine sarcoma discovered five years before. A little more than four months after the diagnosis, she received a partial bone marrow transplant. In an interview for the Paris Review, in 1995, Sontag was asked what she thought was the purpose of literature. "A novel worth reading," she replied, "is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness." She was the cartographer of her own literary explorations. Henry James once remarked, "Nothing is my last word on anything." For Sontag, as for James, there was always more to be said, more to be felt. In addition to her son, she is survived by a sister, Judith Cohen. Her papers -- manuscripts, diaries, journals and correspondence -- as well as her 25,000-volume personal library were acquired by the UCLA Library in 2002 and will be housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. * (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) An author of wide-ranging interests A partial list of Susan Sontag's work: Essay collections: "Styles of Radical Will," "On Photography," "Under the Sign of Saturn," "Illness as Metaphor," "Regarding the Pain of Others." Novels and short stories: "The Benefactor," "Death Kit," "I, etcetera," "The Volcano Lover," "In America." Films: "Duet for Cannibals," "Brother Carl," "Promised Lands," "Unguided Tour." Plays: "Alice in Bed," "Lady From the Sea." Source: A Times staff writer ---------------- Boston Globe / Obituaries / Susan Sontag, essayist, social activist, dead at 71 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2004/12/29/susan_so ntag_essayist_social_activist_dead_at_71?pg=full By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | December 29, 2004 Susan Sontag -- one of America's preeminent intellectuals, whose essays, novels, and political pronouncements made her both revered and reviled for four decades -- died of leukemia yesterday in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She was 71. Ms. Sontag was a unique figure in world culture, uncategorizable and larger than life. For the most part, she avoided academe and any institutional affiliation, going her own severe way. She refused to be pigeonholed. Along with the essays that won her fame, she wrote novels, short stories, and plays; made four films; and directed theater. Ms. Sontag took all of culture as her preserve. Although she professed to be proudest of her novels, which include the National Book Award-winning ''In America" (2000), she was best known for her essays. She wrote extensively on literature and film, but her two most widely read books are ''On Photography" (1976) and ''Illness as Metaphor" (1978). The latter, a study of the slippery cultural uses that diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis have been put to, grew out of her own experience with breast cancer in the mid-1970s. A formidable, intimidating personage, Ms. Sontag was alternately acclaimed as a priestess of high culture and scorned, in the words of the novelist John Updike, as ''our glamorous camp follower of the French avant-garde." Even Ms. Sontag's harshest detractors had to concede her towering erudition. The novelist Carlos Fuentes once likened her to the great Renaissance thinker Erasmus. ''Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing," Fuentes wrote. ''Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity to link, to connect, to relate." That capacity to link and connect helped give Ms. Sontag's work its distinctly cosmopolitan cast. She divided her time between New York and Europe, and the world of Anglo-American letters held little interest for her. The figures she most admired tended to be European -- Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Jean-Luc Godard -- and, like her, tended to be more comfortable with thought than feeling. Indeed, Ms. Sontag's erudition lent a slightly inhuman aspect to her work. Her bookishness flirted with airlessness, and not a few readers detected solemnity and self-aggrandizement in her lofty intellectual tone. An innate intellectual austerity informed everything she wrote. ''Somebody says: 'The road is straight,' " she said in a 1978 interview. ''OK, then: 'The road is straight as a string.' There's such a profound part of me that feels that 'the road is straight' is all you need to say and all you should say." Ms. Sontag professed to disdain the machinery of publicity, yet this seemed only to add to her fame. She had an undeniable mystique, one that drew as much on her striking appearance as on her intellectual firepower. ''Very intense, very pretty, and very interested in absolutely everything" was how her publisher, Roger Straus, once described her. At various times dubbed ''the Natalie Wood of the US avant-garde" and ''the Dark Lady of American Letters," Ms. Sontag was that rarest of creatures: a celebrity intellectual. Irving Penn photographed her for Vogue. Kevin Costner's character in the movie ''Bull Durham" hails Ms. Sontag as ''brilliant," even as he dismisses her fiction as ''self-indulgent, overrated crap." A song in the Broadway musical ''Rent" cites her. She appeared as herself in Woody Allen's movie ''Zelig." Her habit of dying her hair so as to preserve a lightning-bolt-like white streak inspired a New Yorker cartoon. Ms. Sontag's celebrity sprang in part from her sense of political engagement. During the late 1980s, she served a term as president of the American branch of PEN, the international literary organization, and she was one of the first writers to denounce the death sentence imposed on the novelist Salman Rushdie. To draw attention to the plight of Sarajevo during the early '90s, she visited the besieged city 11 times and directed a production of ''Waiting for Godot" there. ''She was a true friend in need," Rushdie said in a statement yesterday. ''Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles." Ms. Sontag's political commitment earned her attacks as well as plaudits. She notoriously wrote that ''the white race is the cancer of human history" (a statement she later lamented, as much rhetorically as politically, in ''Illness as Metaphor"). She rhapsodized over North Vietnam in her 1968 ''Trip to Hanoi." Conversely, she drew the ire of radicals when she spoke at a pro-Solidarity rally in 1982 and said Reader's Digest had more accurately described the reality of Soviet Communism than The Nation had. Even so, nothing could have prepared Ms. Sontag for the firestorm that followed her writing in The New Yorker shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, ''Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world,' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" Although Ms. Sontag tempered her radicalism over the years, she remained very much on the left. Her political views mirrored her aesthetic views. She championed the avant-garde and esoteric. Critics accused her of being an over-eager promoter of the new in such early essay collections as ''Against Interpretation" (1966) and ''Styles of Radical Will" (1969). She famously argued that ''in place of a hermeneutics [interpretation] we need an erotics of art." Yet in many ways Ms. Sontag was a deeply conservative figure. There is an Old Testament righteousness to her cultural pronouncements, and a high moral seriousness informs everything she wrote. Prime instances would be ''AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1988) and ''Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), which analyzes images of atrocity. It's no small irony that Ms. Sontag's most famous essay should be called ''Notes on Camp." Nonetheless, it was entirely characteristic of her to take so seriously something so inherently frivolous. Susan Lee Rosenblatt was born on Jan 16, 1933, in Manhattan, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt and Mildren (Jacobsen) Rosenblatt. The Rosenblatts ran a fur-trading business in China. Ms. Sontag and her sister, Judith, were reared in New York by a nanny. After Ms. Sontag's father died, in 1938, the family moved to Miami, then Tucson, because of her asthma. Ms. Sontag's mother met an Air Force captain, Nathan Sontag, and the couple married in 1945. The family moved to California a year later. When Ms. Sontag graduated from North Hollywood High School at 15, the principal announced there was nothing more the school could teach her. Ms. Sontag briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley and then went to the University of Chicago. At 17, she married Philip Rieff, a lecturer at the university. The couple, who divorced in 1958, had a son. Years later, David Rieff would become an editor at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and edit his mother's books. Taking only two years to graduate from Chicago, Ms. Sontag earned master's degrees in English and philosophy at Harvard. She also did graduate work at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Moving with her son to New York after her divorce, she briefly worked for Commentary magazine and held a series of short-term teaching posts at the City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence, and Columbia University. Ms. Sontag's first book was a novel, ''The Benefactor" (1963). Her other novels include ''Death Kit" (1967) and ''The Volcano Lover" (1992). She also published one collection of short fiction, ''I, etcetera" (1978), and the essay collections ''Under the Sign of Saturn" (1980) and ''Where the Stress Falls" (2002). ''I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am," Ms. Sontag told The Guardian newspaper in 2002, ''because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time." In addition to her son, she leaves a sister, Judith Cohen. Her funeral will be private. A public memorial service will be held at a later date. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:15:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:15:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Message-ID: Redemption and American Politics The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15b01401.htm By DAN P. McADAMS Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-interested citizenry would oust an administration whose tax reform favors mainly the rich, whose foreign policy has cost friends and made enemies abroad, and whose faith-based approach to leadership has exalted conservative ideology over rational discourse and scientific evidence. But President Bush's decisive victory in the popular vote combined with the sea of red spilling across the Tuesday-night electoral map suggests that blue-state Democrats are now out of touch with much of the rest of the country. What explains this disconnect? Already pundits and pollsters have suggested many different possibilities -- from religiosity to gay marriage to the fear of Osama bin Laden. From my standpoint, however, the key factor is narrative. Put simply, the Republicans are better storytellers. More precisely, the Republican Party has groomed candidates and honed messages that resonate deeply with a story of life that Americans hold dear. It is the narrative of redemption -- a story about an innocent protagonist in a dangerous world who sticks to simple principles and overcomes suffering and hardship in the end. This is a story that many productive and caring American adults -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- love to tell about their own lives. Republicans, however, have found ways of talking about public life and political issues that reinforce this story. And to the extent that politics is personal, many Americans may vote their story, rather than their pocketbook. As a research psychologist, I study how people tell stories about their own lives. My students and I collect these stories and analyze them as if they were works of literary fiction. Indeed, they are fiction, to a certain extent. People selectively remember the past and imagine their own futures to produce coherent narratives of the self that will provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose. Stories give us our identities. In our research, we focus on the life stories told by those adults who score very high on both objective and self-reported psychological measures of social responsibility and productivity. We want to understand especially well-adjusted people who are making the most positive contributions to their work, families, and society at large. Be they liberal or conservative, these highly productive and caring American adults tend to describe their own lives as variations on a general script that we call the redemptive self. The story of the redemptive self in American life has two key themes. The first is the belief that as a young child, I was fortunate, blessed, or advantaged in some manner, even as others around me experienced suffering and pain. I am the innocent protagonist, chosen for a special, manifest destiny. As I journey forth in a dangerous world, I hold to simple truths, basic values of goodness and decency. Research shows that highly productive and caring American adults, especially in their midlife years, are much more likely than other people to remember their past in this way. They are also more likely to claim that they have always operated according to deep personal values that are clear and true. While their values may not be those of George W. Bush, they tell stories about their lives that, like the president's own, underscore the power of moral clarity. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race." Tocqueville realized that the Americans' sense of special destiny lay partly in their celebration of the individual self. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person," proclaimed Walt Whitman. And, "Is not a man better than a town?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance. (The fact that a town is made up of individual men -- and women -- seems strangely absent from Emerson's thinking.) Not only are we the chosen people, Emerson suggested, but each individual man (or woman) is chosen for a special destiny. That individual destiny is inscribed within an inner self that is always true and good. In Emerson's uniquely American brand of romantic individualism, the good and productive life is the heroic actualization of the inner self. Flash forward 150 years or so. In interviews, highly productive and caring American adults tend to begin the stories of their own lives in the same way. They speak the language of chosen-ness and manifest destiny, albeit in contemporary and personal ways. To a significantly greater extent than adults who score lower on measures of care and productivity, they will identify a specific incident from childhood as symbolic of their enhanced status, as if to suggest that they have known they were special, that they were chosen, for a very long time. At the same time, productive and caring American adults are especially likely to say that they held an early awareness that the world is not fair and that many other people suffer greatly. The juxtaposition of inner blessing and hardship in the outside world sets up a moral contrast. I need to use my goodness to make the world a better place. I need to use my gift in a positive way. The sense of individual mission that runs through the redemptive self is often linked to life principles consolidated in the teenage years, be the formative influences Ayn Rand, Maya Angelou, Tuesdays With Morrie, or Jesus. (While many cringed, Bush's fans ate it up when he identified Jesus Christ as his "favorite political philosopher" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore.) The protagonists in these stories are not the tormented souls or ironic drifters celebrated by European existentialist writers and postmodern literary critics. They don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the meaning of life is. They know what is right, more or less, and they strive to put their life principles into action. There is a decided lack of ambivalence about moral and ethical values in the life stories of highly productive and caring American adults, be they evangelical Christians or card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, we witness clear-eyed, no-nonsense protagonists who have too many things to do and too little time to waste on a searching re-examination of what is good and true, who is God, and what they believe in their hearts to be right. From Benjamin Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with vigor and confidence. The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved to feeling free. From Franklin to Oprah, from Horatio Alger to 12-step programs, American folklore and culture have provided a treasure trove of redemptive narratives from which we all (unconsciously) borrow in fashioning the stories of our own lives. The burgeoning popular literature on self-help offers a cornucopia of redemption tales, as do television talk shows, People magazine, and Hollywood. Politicians often celebrate their own redemptive journeys: Ronald Reagan rose from a dysfunctional family; Bill Clinton (nicknamed "the Comeback Kid") recovered from childhood poverty (as well as many self-inflicted wounds); George W. Bush turned his life around in his 40s, after years of drifting and drinking; John Edwards started out "the son of a mill worker," but he rose from there. Surveying American novels and short stories from recent years, the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, "There is no public narrative more potent today -- or throughout American history -- than the one about redemption." George W. Bush's personal story follows closely the script of the redemptive self. Born with a special blessing, he came close to squandering it all before he gave up alcohol, found the Lord, and rededicated his life to public service. It is a powerful recovery narrative, starring the kind of guileless protagonist that many Americans love. In this kind of story, moral clarity trumps worldly sophistication (and debating skills). His detractors may call him stupid, simple-minded, and stubborn. But many voters see Bush as sincere and well meaning. They like that he does not seem to obsess over the complexities of the world. They find assurance in his commitment to simple principles. And even those who are not born-again Christians may admire his recovery story. We are all sinners, after all. Yet in the eyes of many people, Bush really seems to have redeemed his sinful past. For the past 10 years or so, he has kept his eyes on the prize. He has remained steadfast, unwavering. He has lived out a destiny to which he feels he has been called. More important than the president's own story, however, is the way in which optimistic (if sometimes simplistic) Republican messages about "values," faith-based initiatives, individual freedom and responsibility, and the "ownership society" reinforce a grand narrative about a good and innocent protagonist who takes charge of his own life, stays focused through adversity, and ultimately triumphs in the end. The heroes in this story are the small-business owners, the entrepreneurs, the soldiers, the preachers, and the un-self-conscious individualists who, like Emerson, trust the good and simple "man" over the ambiguous and complex "town." The enemies are ambiguous and complex collectives of various kinds -- "big government," for example, bureaucracies, the United Nations, and programs and policies that potentially compromise the innocent strivings of the good inner self. It does not matter much that Republicans have actually grown the government (to say nothing of the deficit) rather than shrunk it, that they also advocate certain kinds of government programs and policies. It does not matter because politics is as much about stories as it is about anything else. Republicans are masters at simplifying the world into upbeat narratives about good protagonists who will find redemption in the end. By reducing taxes, empowering faith, and assuring national security, they promise to clear away the many obstacles and complexities that clutter up the world and stand in the path of the redemptive hero's quest. The attacks of September 11 and the "war on terrorism," furthermore, play perfectly into the story of the redemptive self. Terrorism and war show us that the world is a dangerous, unredeemed place. In times of crisis, the good American protagonist must call upon the deepest reservoir of unwavering conviction and hope. A dangerous world is indeed the kind of world that the good and strong hero of the redemptive self seems unconsciously to expect. Under conditions of adversity, he will fight the good fight. He will keep the faith. In the end, his suffering will give way to redemption. And along the way, he may even help to redeem others. Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:15:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:15:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Spanish Basques Approve Secession Measure Message-ID: Spanish Basques Approve Secession Measure NYT December 31, 2004 By RENWICK McLEAN MADRID, Dec. 30 - The Basque Parliament approved a measure on Thursday that says the Basque region has the right to secede from Spain, a move analysts described as the most serious threat to national unity since the establishment of democracy here nearly 30 years ago. The measure, approved by a vote of 39 to 35, is part of a complex plan that calls for an overhaul of the region's relationship with the central government in Madrid. "We express our will to form a new political pact," the plan says, "that grows from a new model for relations with the Spanish state based on freedom of association." Before the vote, which was held in the Basque capital, Vitoria, Juan Jos? Ibarretxe, the president of the Basque region and the main author of the plan, said, "We are not proposing a project for breaking away from Spain, but we are formalizing a project for friendly coexistence between the Basque region and Spain. "The Basque country is not a subordinate part of the Spanish state," he added. "The only way there will be a shared relationship with the state is if we decide there will be one." Political analysts said that the vote gave momentum to the separatist movement in the Basque region, and presented the central government with the task of confronting the movement without inflaming it. "This is the clearest push for independence that the Basque country has made," said Antonio Ca?o, a senior editor at the newspaper El Pa?s. "It is a very clear challenge to the unity of Spain. I'd say it places the country in its biggest crisis of unity since democracy began here." For nearly 40 years, the various regions that make up Spain were kept together by the iron fist of Gen. Francisco Franco. But since his death in 1975, some analysts have wondered if a democratic government would be able to keep the country united. The central government, led by the Socialist Party, has said that it is willing to discuss requests for greater autonomy, but has rejected the claim that the Basque region has the right to unilaterally determine its relationship with Madrid. "We've made it very clear," Mar?a Teresa Fern?ndez de la Vega, the deputy prime minister, said at a conference before the vote. "The plan goes against the Constitution." The plan now moves to the national Parliament, where it will surely be rejected, analysts said. But supporters of the plan, led by Mr. Ibarretxe, said a defeat would not stop them from submitting it to a popular referendum in the Basque region next year. The central government has said such a referendum is illegal. Thursday's vote surprised analysts here, who expected the measure to fail to gain the support of a small group of separatists who had said the plan was too moderate. But three members of the group, a party known as Herri Batasuna, decided to support it, providing enough votes for the majority needed for passage. The Basque region, a mountainous area of two million people on the northern border with France, is one of 17 semi-autonomous regions that make up Spain. Many of them, most notably Catalonia, are also seeking greater autonomy from Madrid. But it is the Basques who are most clearly associated with a drive for looser ties with the central government, and even separatism. The militant group ETA has made headlines for decades through a bloody campaign to establish an independent Basque state, killing more than 800 people since 1968 in the process. The overwhelming majority of Basques oppose ETA, whose tactics may even weaken support for independence, analysts said. But slightly more than half of Basque voters support so-called nationalist parties, which advocate greater autonomy. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/europe/31basque.html From checker at panix.com Sat Jan 1 11:16:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:16:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Women Are Gaining Ground on the Wage Front Message-ID: Women Are Gaining Ground on the Wage Front NYT December 31, 2004 By LOUIS UCHITELLE Ever since the 2001 recession sent the economy into a prolonged period of weak hiring, hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone through some variation of Tom and Marie DeSisto's experience. Concerned that he might be laid off as Verizon cut staff, Mr. DeSisto, 54, accepted an early retirement package, giving up a manager's salary of more than $100,000 a year. Now he earns half that as a high school math teacher in Waltham, Mass., while Mrs. DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district. In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Mrs. DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the last five years as she moved from a nursing job in Framingham, another Boston suburb, to responsibility as supervisor for a growing staff of school nurses in Waltham. That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women - while many men stood still or got hurt - has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay. Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one. The gains for women have stuck. As the economy improved in the second half of the 1990's, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Mr. DeSisto, failed to get back into the work force at the same pay levels as before. "Everyone's image of how they wanted to close the gender gap was for women to catch up with men in pay, without men going backward," said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy. "Now it is clear that for substantial groups of people in the labor market, that is not how it is closing." The dynamics reflect profound shifts in the economy. Men are more vulnerable than women to layoffs, mainly because they predominate in industries that are walloped in downturns, particularly manufacturing. Then, too, the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990's, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage has responded by rising. College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs. Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of "the rising educational attainment of women who work full time." That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings. Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990's, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion. For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. "Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top," she said, "and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay." For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles. Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations that tend to ride out job cuts almost untouched. These include education, health care and civil service employment. Ms. Bergmann recognizes that this backdoor route to wage equality may not be the most desirable path. "We would prefer that pay converge in a strong economy," she said, "but however it happens, we should be happy it is happening." Men who work full time still earn nearly 20 percent more than women who do. The score is $693 in median weekly pay, adjusted for inflation, to $560 for women, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The median means that half of the workers in each sex earn more and half earn less. The current $133 weekly gap has narrowed from $260 in 1979. But $62 of that progress, or 47 percent, has been compressed into the two periods of stepped-up labor cost-cutting that started with the 1990-1991 and the 2001 recessions. In the latest episode, total employment has not yet risen back to its prerecession level. The economy is reviving, but hiring has not improved as much. Employers appear to be still engaging in what David H. Autor, an economist at Harvard University, calls "the cleansing effects of hard times." Men's pay during these cleansings has stagnated or dropped, while women's pay has continued to rise, although more slowly than in good times. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that men's pay would still be 25 percent higher than women's, as it was in 2000, if men's pay had continued to grow at the 1995-to-2000 pace, when the economy boomed and employers hired in droves. That prosperous five-year stretch was no help at all in closing the wage gap. These were years in which high-technology companies and dot-coms prospered, and they were big employers of well-paid men, whose high wages pulled up the median for their group. Just as this was happening, women's pay was held down. The surge in hiring brought thousands of women from welfare into low-wage jobs, and their presence became a drag on the median wage of women. The wage gap even began to widen a bit, but starting in 1998 manufacturing jobs disappeared in large numbers, and that blow to well-paid blue-collar men pushed down the median pay of all men. The convergence in pay, of course, also reflects the underlying achievement of women in recent years. They are graduating from college in greater numbers than men and pushing into high-end occupations once dominated by men. The share of women, for example, in "executive, administrative and managerial occupations," as the labor bureau calls this category, is more than 46 percent today, up from 40 percent in 1990 and 32 percent in 1983. And there are similar or even greater gains in various administrative and professional ranks. Women are also gradually pushing into high-paid blue-collar occupations, despite continued sexual segregation, and each step forward helps to lift the median pay of women vis-?-vis men. Volvo Trucks North America, for example, is one of the few manufacturing companies that is hiring these days, adding 1,117 people this year at plants in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. Enough of these hires are women to lift their presence on the assembly lines, where union wages apply, to 15 percent from 13 percent in 2003, the company says. Driving tractor-trailers on long hauls across the country is another bastion of high-paid men's work that women have been trickling into lately. Of the 3,800 drivers at C. R. England, for example, 10 percent are women, up from zero in the 1980's, said Dean England, chief operating officer of the family-owned company based in Salt Lake City. Not many people are able to adjust to the rigors of a lifestyle that keeps them on the road for weeks at a time, Mr. England said. The driver turnover rate at his company is 100 percent a year, but for those who can handle it - men and women - the pay averages $40,000. "They are mostly middle-aged women," Mr. England said, "and they come to us because they are sick of having to work so hard at service jobs that pay only $10 an hour." As for the DeSistos in the Boston suburbs, Marie is working her way up the pay scale while her husband, Tom, is starting a new career as a high school math teacher earning $50,000, half his old pay. "I'm teaching the basics at the start, algebra and geometry, moving along with the kids," he said. "You work with freshmen and sophomores and as the years go by, you teach them trig and higher math." Mr. DeSisto, a civil engineer, had 30 years at Verizon and its predecessors, Bell Atlantic and before that, AT&T. He had expected to work at Verizon into his 60's. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, Mr. DeSisto said, that layoffs would ensue if the retirement offer was undersubscribed. It was not. Last year, 21,600 people took early retirement at Verizon, a number of them men like Mr. DeSisto with enough tenure to qualify for lump sum pension payouts in the high six figures. After nine months of unemployment, he took the teaching job in the school system that employs his wife. Mrs. DeSisto went back to work as a nurse 11 years ago, when the youngest of the DeSistos' three children was 10, working first in the Framingham schools where her salary rose in time to $36,000 - and then to $56,000 when she shifted to the supervisor's job in Waltham five years ago. Her salary has risen annually ever since, partly through raises but also in recognition of a recently earned master's degree in nursing and business administration. But what truly drives the expansion of school nursing and the rising pay, in her view, is the growing incidence of health problems among students, now that more disabled and ailing children are accepted into the public schools. Her staff has expanded to 16 nurses from 9 when she arrived. "I like to hire nurses with master's degrees and experience," she said. "They are in buildings where they are the only ones with medical knowledge." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/business/31wage.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 14:48:35 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 06:48:35 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Message-ID: <01C4EFCD.EB2919D0.shovland@mindspring.com> As the war goes on, another story will be told about the Republicans: they led us to disaster. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 3:15 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Redemption and American Politics Redemption and American Politics The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.12.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15b01401.htm By DAN P. McADAMS Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-interested citizenry would oust an administration whose tax reform favors mainly the rich, whose foreign policy has cost friends and made enemies abroad, and whose faith-based approach to leadership has exalted conservative ideology over rational discourse and scientific evidence. But President Bush's decisive victory in the popular vote combined with the sea of red spilling across the Tuesday-night electoral map suggests that blue-state Democrats are now out of touch with much of the rest of the country. What explains this disconnect? Already pundits and pollsters have suggested many different possibilities -- from religiosity to gay marriage to the fear of Osama bin Laden. From my standpoint, however, the key factor is narrative. Put simply, the Republicans are better storytellers. More precisely, the Republican Party has groomed candidates and honed messages that resonate deeply with a story of life that Americans hold dear. It is the narrative of redemption -- a story about an innocent protagonist in a dangerous world who sticks to simple principles and overcomes suffering and hardship in the end. This is a story that many productive and caring American adults -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- love to tell about their own lives. Republicans, however, have found ways of talking about public life and political issues that reinforce this story. And to the extent that politics is personal, many Americans may vote their story, rather than their pocketbook. As a research psychologist, I study how people tell stories about their own lives. My students and I collect these stories and analyze them as if they were works of literary fiction. Indeed, they are fiction, to a certain extent. People selectively remember the past and imagine their own futures to produce coherent narratives of the self that will provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose. Stories give us our identities. In our research, we focus on the life stories told by those adults who score very high on both objective and self-reported psychological measures of social responsibility and productivity. We want to understand especially well-adjusted people who are making the most positive contributions to their work, families, and society at large. Be they liberal or conservative, these highly productive and caring American adults tend to describe their own lives as variations on a general script that we call the redemptive self. The story of the redemptive self in American life has two key themes. The first is the belief that as a young child, I was fortunate, blessed, or advantaged in some manner, even as others around me experienced suffering and pain. I am the innocent protagonist, chosen for a special, manifest destiny. As I journey forth in a dangerous world, I hold to simple truths, basic values of goodness and decency. Research shows that highly productive and caring American adults, especially in their midlife years, are much more likely than other people to remember their past in this way. They are also more likely to claim that they have always operated according to deep personal values that are clear and true. While their values may not be those of George W. Bush, they tell stories about their lives that, like the president's own, underscore the power of moral clarity. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race." Tocqueville realized that the Americans' sense of special destiny lay partly in their celebration of the individual self. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person," proclaimed Walt Whitman. And, "Is not a man better than a town?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance. (The fact that a town is made up of individual men -- and women -- seems strangely absent from Emerson's thinking.) Not only are we the chosen people, Emerson suggested, but each individual man (or woman) is chosen for a special destiny. That individual destiny is inscribed within an inner self that is always true and good. In Emerson's uniquely American brand of romantic individualism, the good and productive life is the heroic actualization of the inner self. Flash forward 150 years or so. In interviews, highly productive and caring American adults tend to begin the stories of their own lives in the same way. They speak the language of chosen-ness and manifest destiny, albeit in contemporary and personal ways. To a significantly greater extent than adults who score lower on measures of care and productivity, they will identify a specific incident from childhood as symbolic of their enhanced status, as if to suggest that they have known they were special, that they were chosen, for a very long time. At the same time, productive and caring American adults are especially likely to say that they held an early awareness that the world is not fair and that many other people suffer greatly. The juxtaposition of inner blessing and hardship in the outside world sets up a moral contrast. I need to use my goodness to make the world a better place. I need to use my gift in a positive way. The sense of individual mission that runs through the redemptive self is often linked to life principles consolidated in the teenage years, be the formative influences Ayn Rand, Maya Angelou, Tuesdays With Morrie, or Jesus. (While many cringed, Bush's fans ate it up when he identified Jesus Christ as his "favorite political philosopher" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore.) The protagonists in these stories are not the tormented souls or ironic drifters celebrated by European existentialist writers and postmodern literary critics. They don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the meaning of life is. They know what is right, more or less, and they strive to put their life principles into action. There is a decided lack of ambivalence about moral and ethical values in the life stories of highly productive and caring American adults, be they evangelical Christians or card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, we witness clear-eyed, no-nonsense protagonists who have too many things to do and too little time to waste on a searching re-examination of what is good and true, who is God, and what they believe in their hearts to be right. From Benjamin Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with vigor and confidence. The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved to feeling free. From Franklin to Oprah, from Horatio Alger to 12-step programs, American folklore and culture have provided a treasure trove of redemptive narratives from which we all (unconsciously) borrow in fashioning the stories of our own lives. The burgeoning popular literature on self-help offers a cornucopia of redemption tales, as do television talk shows, People magazine, and Hollywood. Politicians often celebrate their own redemptive journeys: Ronald Reagan rose from a dysfunctional family; Bill Clinton (nicknamed "the Comeback Kid") recovered from childhood poverty (as well as many self-inflicted wounds); George W. Bush turned his life around in his 40s, after years of drifting and drinking; John Edwards started out "the son of a mill worker," but he rose from there. Surveying American novels and short stories from recent years, the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, "There is no public narrative more potent today -- or throughout American history -- than the one about redemption." George W. Bush's personal story follows closely the script of the redemptive self. Born with a special blessing, he came close to squandering it all before he gave up alcohol, found the Lord, and rededicated his life to public service. It is a powerful recovery narrative, starring the kind of guileless protagonist that many Americans love. In this kind of story, moral clarity trumps worldly sophistication (and debating skills). His detractors may call him stupid, simple-minded, and stubborn. But many voters see Bush as sincere and well meaning. They like that he does not seem to obsess over the complexities of the world. They find assurance in his commitment to simple principles. And even those who are not born-again Christians may admire his recovery story. We are all sinners, after all. Yet in the eyes of many people, Bush really seems to have redeemed his sinful past. For the past 10 years or so, he has kept his eyes on the prize. He has remained steadfast, unwavering. He has lived out a destiny to which he feels he has been called. More important than the president's own story, however, is the way in which optimistic (if sometimes simplistic) Republican messages about "values," faith-based initiatives, individual freedom and responsibility, and the "ownership society" reinforce a grand narrative about a good and innocent protagonist who takes charge of his own life, stays focused through adversity, and ultimately triumphs in the end. The heroes in this story are the small-business owners, the entrepreneurs, the soldiers, the preachers, and the un-self-conscious individualists who, like Emerson, trust the good and simple "man" over the ambiguous and complex "town." The enemies are ambiguous and complex collectives of various kinds -- "big government," for example, bureaucracies, the United Nations, and programs and policies that potentially compromise the innocent strivings of the good inner self. It does not matter much that Republicans have actually grown the government (to say nothing of the deficit) rather than shrunk it, that they also advocate certain kinds of government programs and policies. It does not matter because politics is as much about stories as it is about anything else. Republicans are masters at simplifying the world into upbeat narratives about good protagonists who will find redemption in the end. By reducing taxes, empowering faith, and assuring national security, they promise to clear away the many obstacles and complexities that clutter up the world and stand in the path of the redemptive hero's quest. The attacks of September 11 and the "war on terrorism," furthermore, play perfectly into the story of the redemptive self. Terrorism and war show us that the world is a dangerous, unredeemed place. In times of crisis, the good American protagonist must call upon the deepest reservoir of unwavering conviction and hope. A dangerous world is indeed the kind of world that the good and strong hero of the redemptive self seems unconsciously to expect. Under conditions of adversity, he will fight the good fight. He will keep the faith. In the end, his suffering will give way to redemption. And along the way, he may even help to redeem others. Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Jan 1 15:40:50 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 10:40:50 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] making gross errors In-Reply-To: <20041231194215.99613.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200412311900.iBVJ0R014517@tick.javien.com> <20041231194215.99613.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050101093609.01dd2930@incoming.verizon.net> At 02:42 PM 12/31/2004, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>If no one knows anything, how can we possibly expect >NOT to be making gross errors, regularly?<< > >--Good question. And most of us don't have direct >contact with the problems we discuss, so we HAVE to >rely to a large degree on second and third hand >information. Which introduces the element of bias, >especially at times when large groups are becoming >more and more polarized, convinced the other is evil >as opposed to merely operating out of a different set Indeed. The sheer complexity of the flow of information has created a whole lot of 4th hand distortions, in MANY areas of knowledge... but the filtering at each stage is a major part of the problem. There is some kind of spiritual collective intelligence effect, I would argue.. and even some biological approximations to that... But there is also what Janis called "Groupthink," which is a serious problem in our society as a whole. Corporate cultures which prize loyalty and victory without concern for the search for objective truth tend to be vulnerable to such aberrations in general. My statement here was not intended as a disguised comment on the Iraq war as such or on the blue state red state polarization. But certainly there have been times when the projections we send to the Middle East have made me cringe with pain... as with Gore's comment in the 2000 debates "make no mistake, whatever else we do, I stand by Israel..." (There are times when how one phrases or formulates a legitimate concern really do matter... If he had said "I will not tolerate genocide or actions intended to open the door to genocide on either side..." and elaborated... it might have all gone very differently. That may have been a decisive moment in history.) >of axioms about human nature. And axioms about human >nature are notoriously difficult to change, since they >tend to grow out of one's personal sense of identity >more than out of observation of a large number of >specific instances of human behavior. Certainly there are key axioms in people's logic which are making problems seem intractable. For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with. Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom. Is that axiom an axiom about behavior? Really, it is more an axiom in people's religious beliefs ... or in their inner vision of what the choices of lifestyle are. Both aspects need to be considered. For all the horrors of extreme fundamentalism... we should remember that there are people in Iraq for whom "Islam" also means a comfortable existence where the boys hang out with their buddies for hours, unthreatened, in local tea houses or lodges -- and they don't want to be forced to turn into the Borg, efficient wired-up robots in high-density housing without any real life whose closest approach to nature is pictures in a perverted shopping mall... Even Russia has recently shown the RESULTS of fears that Exxon would corrupt their government, and REDUCE personal freedom even more than the alternatives we complain about. Instead of condemning these folks for their legitimate fears, we might think about how to address them constructively. Yes, they do bad things to themselves when they cringe with fear and revert to reactionary forms of government, but can we work to find alternatives? Yet to do that, we need to understand them better. Pure partisan ways of thinking, without tempering by the objective search for truth, have a way of blocking the understanding. But then again -- axioms about humans and the human mind are also an important part of the equation. It does make a difference what we believe about the soul, and its connection to the affairs of the world. It makes a difference whether people subscribe to primitive views of heaven versus hell, or proscriptions against abortion. And it makes a difference whether people understand how the human mind -- brain or soul or both -- is hard-wired to try to learn to do its very best and to overcome its initial mistakes, using symbolic reasoning at times to escape from local minima. With complex institutions like the Catholic Church, for example, truth demands that we try to extract what is truly positive and hopeful, and what is truly dangerous and untrustworthy, both at the same time. Both aspects of the church have been important to human development for centuries now. I have occasionally made quick comments about mullahs and TV preachers... which may have been too quick at times. There is of course a diversity in all groups. The specific Saudi mullahs who generate Al Queida membership espouse axioms of thought and action which are nonsustainable -- inconsistent with human survival and, in my view, inconsistent with spiritual survival. (I recall the part of the letter from Paul where he says that those who have the law and not the spirit... have nothing, which is a polite way of putting it.) But Al-Sistani in Iraq seems to have a certain degree of spiritual authenticity, more than anyone else I have heard of in the Middle East in this century. But that leads into a point which is very difficult to discuss. Even in Freudian psychology, there was a debate about "thanatos," a death impulse. Real or not? (It's not part of our modern mathematical formulation of Freudian psychodynamics.) What about evil and such? Hard to ignore such question when discussing the Middle East. And THEIR axioms about Evil are certainly part of what destabilizes the situation. In fact -- many people in the Middle East have reverted back to Zoroastrian ideas so extreme... I could picture Mohammed asking, in exasperation, "Why did I even TRY with these people? They just fall back on the same old stuff I tried to help them out of..." (And I can imagine Jesus saying the same about TV preachers trying to convert everyone to being Pharisees. But curiously enough he actually warned about that sort of stuff well in advance... "Many will come in my name...") And so... there IS stuff going on in the Middle East which I would regard as very real but very destructive (self-destructive) on the spiritual level. When Al-Zarkawi takes such deep pleasure in personally dripping himself in blood and announces that "Iraqi blood tastes better than American blood"... we have to be sober about what we are facing. People may be hurting themselves more than anyone else, because of THEIR misguided axioms about how things work, but it could hurt everyone if they push the entire area into orgies of self-destruction. Again, I have been very impressed by a few subtle points in Modesitt's recent science fiction, the Ethos Effect. > At times, the >study of human beings is actively discouraged (or >dismissed as "psychobabble" or "academic elitism") in >favor of folk theories about what human beings are and >what behavior means. We could all do with a dose of >humility. I suspect neither side in a polarity has the >full view, and the more each reacts against the other, I am not entirely sure which polarity you are referring to in these sentences. There are many. In fact... when I think about the barriers to deeper knowledge of the human mind in US universities today... much of it reminds me of what that friend once said about "how do you do therapy on a jellyfish?" But then again, the schism between science and the soul is not a jellyfish thing. That is the deepest polarization in our understanding. Humility is certainly a key part of the search for truth. But... this leads into very large issues... and I have written to many words already here, I suspect... Happy New Year... Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 18:19:49 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 10:19:49 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Message-ID: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 111024 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jan 1 21:47:25 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 13:47:25 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative In-Reply-To: <200501011820.j01IKH020573@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050101214725.29172.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with.<< --Indeed. The leap from "You can't stop hardcore fanatics with dialog" (probably true) to "You can't have a dialog with anyone who is not on our side" (gross generalization) is all too easy. >>Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom.<< --Very true. The belief that doubt is treason does lead to nervous breakdown, and when a culture is locked into an extreme position and unable to see its own dysfunctional side, a fall is inevitable. The schizophrenia within the Islamic community is easily noticed by Westerners, but the schizophrenia within our own society is harder for us to see, because we are committed to a worldview based on unconscious compartmentalization. Nature does not compartmentalize, and we are eventually forced to see what we thought were very simple, black and white situations, in full color, with all the feelings and perceptions we denied. When a hard-line anti-liberal deplores the "hand-wringing" of liberals, it is an indication that if he were to question his own position, it would lead to guilt and self-doubt. When a leftist deplores the black and white thinking of some conservatives, he cannot see that he is engaging in the same fallacy. Each projects his own shadow onto the other, and eventually there is a role-reversal before balance is reached. The pendulum swing against liberalism, which many conservatives believe is a "return to sanity" will not be permanent. Hopefully the next swing will be toward a harmonious blend of liberal and conservative thinking, instead of reactionary socialism or blind anti-conservatism. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jan 1 22:09:44 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 14:09:44 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative Message-ID: <01C4F00B.8C3D4A70.shovland@mindspring.com> The so-called "swing to the right," in my view, is really the last gasp of the Reptilian mentality. Even as empathy arises from a newer part of the brain, so do Empaths represent the new order, and Reptilians will go the way of the Neanderthal. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 1:47 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] liberal/conservative >>For the immediate dangers in the Middle East, the best-informed people I know point to the simple belief that "dialogue" is unnecessary, unproductive and essentially evil. That's one hell of an axiom to try to cope with.<< --Indeed. The leap from "You can't stop hardcore fanatics with dialog" (probably true) to "You can't have a dialog with anyone who is not on our side" (gross generalization) is all too easy. >>Yet fundamentalists in the US or fanatics of almost any stripe tend to share that same axiom, an axiom which almost REQUIRES either a nervous breakdown or gross hypocrisy in the end, if the people are really committed to the axiom.<< --Very true. The belief that doubt is treason does lead to nervous breakdown, and when a culture is locked into an extreme position and unable to see its own dysfunctional side, a fall is inevitable. The schizophrenia within the Islamic community is easily noticed by Westerners, but the schizophrenia within our own society is harder for us to see, because we are committed to a worldview based on unconscious compartmentalization. Nature does not compartmentalize, and we are eventually forced to see what we thought were very simple, black and white situations, in full color, with all the feelings and perceptions we denied. When a hard-line anti-liberal deplores the "hand-wringing" of liberals, it is an indication that if he were to question his own position, it would lead to guilt and self-doubt. When a leftist deplores the black and white thinking of some conservatives, he cannot see that he is engaging in the same fallacy. Each projects his own shadow onto the other, and eventually there is a role-reversal before balance is reached. The pendulum swing against liberalism, which many conservatives believe is a "return to sanity" will not be permanent. Hopefully the next swing will be toward a harmonious blend of liberal and conservative thinking, instead of reactionary socialism or blind anti-conservatism. michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Jan 2 01:31:19 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:31:19 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal In-Reply-To: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4EFEB.6DCC8710.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D74EE7.1000208@solution-consulting.com> Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . Steve Hovland wrote: > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 111024 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 2 01:47:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 17:47:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Message-ID: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . Steve Hovland wrote: > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jan 2 18:23:27 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 10:23:27 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? Message-ID: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> "George Bush will be the first man in US history to serve two terms without being legitimately elected." From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:32:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:32:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? Message-ID: 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 By PETER SINGER CATASTROPHE Risk and Response. By Richard A. Posner. 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. AN asteroid colliding with the earth could cause the extinction of our species. Is this a risk worth worrying about? More important, is it a risk worth doing something about? Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who produces more books in his leisure hours than most authors do working full time, thinks it is. We should also, he argues, be doing more about other improbable catastrophes. Global warming could cause the melting of icecaps, releasing huge amounts of methane that accelerate further warming, forming a cloud layer so dense as to block out heat from the sun and cause us to go into a deep freeze. High-energy particle accelerators, used by physicists to investigate the fundamental laws of nature, could produce particles that create hyperdense ''strange matter'' that in turn might attract nearby nuclei, thus growing larger and attracting ever more nuclei, until the entire planet is compressed into a sphere no more than 100 meters in diameter. Not worried about these possibilities? Then what about the prospect of bioterrorists genetically modifying an incurable strain of smallpox that wipes out the human species? That might seem a more realistic scenario. ''Catastrophe'' lives up to its title. But it is no sci-fi potboiler, and there will be no movie. Posner made his name defending an economically rational approach to the law, and his new book is dense with complex calculations of the expected costs of catastrophic events, and the amount worth spending in attempts to avert them. The expected costs of a future event are the costs of that event, if it should happen, divided by the probability that it will happen. Thus, if I offer you $1,000 if a tossed coin turns up heads, the expected cost of my offer is $500. (Suppose I offer you $100,000 if a card drawn at random from a full pack is the ace of spades. Would you prefer that offer to $1,000 tied to the toss of the coin? Anyone interested in maximizing his assets would: the expected cost of that offer to me -- and hence the expected value to you -- is $1,923.) When a catastrophe is really catastrophic -- and Posner, it should be emphasized, isn't writing about ''minor'' disasters like the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- it can have a significant expected cost, even if the event is extremely improbable. Consider, for example, the risk that a high-energy particle accelerator will produce a ''strange matter'' disaster. The official risk-assessment team for one of these accelerators, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, offered a series of estimates, one of which puts the annual risk of a disaster at one in five million. That seems a very small risk. But since the disaster would kill six billion people, that estimate gives it an expected cost of 1,200 lives per year. Even if the risk is estimated more conservatively at one in a billion, it has an expected annual cost of six lives. Would we build such an accelerator if we knew that six people would die every year in which it operates? In the third and most difficult chapter of ''Catastrophe,'' Posner explores ways of calculating the costs of catastrophic risks and of possible responses to them. He rebuts the claim that it is not cost-effective to do anything about global warming, an argument that invariably relies on heavily discounting disasters that will not occur for 50 or 100 years. We may wish to invest money to generate wealth rather than spending it to avert gradual global warming, but, as Posner suggests, the victims of the warming are likely to be concentrated in poor countries and will not necessarily benefit from the increased wealth generated by the richer nations. (On the other hand, abrupt, spiraling global warming that flips over into a deep freeze could kill us all, and then increased wealth will not do us any good anyway.) Any economic discussion of the expected cost of catastrophe must put a dollar value on human life. Some will object to this in principle, but unless we can agree on a figure, it will be impossible to decide what expenditure is worth incurring, to build safer roads, say, or to keep minute quantities of toxic chemicals out of our drinking water. Economists working in this area usually investigate how much people are willing to pay to reduce the risk of death -- for example, by buying safety devices for their homes, or preferring to work in a safer occupation for a lower wage than they could get in a high-risk occupation. The reduction in risk is then multiplied by the sum the average person is willing to pay for it to arrive at the value people implicitly place on their lives. Currently, most government departments use a figure of around $5 million, give or take a million or two. One problem with this approach is that most of us assess large risks differently from small ones. We may pay a steep price to reduce a risk of one in a thousand to one in ten thousand, but we are not much concerned about reducing a risk of one in a million to one in a billion. Yet a rational person who is interested in continuing to live should be willing to pay something for this reduction in risk. Clearly, these data show that while people appear to be moderately competent at assessing large risks, they are not very good at thinking about small risks. Posner, however, mostly takes the data on their face, and suggests that the value of a human life actually varies in accordance with the degree of risk we are considering -- so that the loss of each human life in a highly improbable catastrophe should be valued only at $50,000 instead of the $5 million that it would be valued at if we were considering a more likely disaster. This is bizarre. The real worth of our lives has nothing to do with the probability of a particular cause of death. IN short, Posner really has a much stronger case for saying we should spend more to avert small risks of catastrophe than his own calculations indicate. And the case gets stronger still if we take into account some of the larger ethical issues he rapidly brushes aside, especially the question of how we should view the fact that the extinction of our species would prevent the existence of all future generations of human beings. Barring catastrophe, our species may continue to exist for millions of years, gradually overcoming our problems and achieving a level of happiness, fulfillment and moral virtue -- including concern for the well-being of other species -- that far exceeds anything we have yet known. Arguably, this makes a catastrophe that causes our extinction a much greater tragedy than the ''mere'' death of six billion people. Posner's practical recommendations seem calculated to parcel out irritation to everyone. Physicists will not like the doubts he casts on particle accelerators. Liberals will be alarmed by his support for greater police powers to counteract bioterrorism, including censorship of scientific publications that could help terrorists devise new biological weapons. Conservatives will dislike his support for taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, and will be apoplectic at his proposal that we hand over some of the nation's sovereign powers to an international environmental protection agency to enforce an improved version of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. As for ordinary readers, they will most likely be annoyed by the book's frequent repetitiveness, particularly in the concluding chapter, and may wonder what the two pages urging severe punishment for computer hackers are doing in a book about catastrophes. (Did Posner lose part of his manuscript to a computer virus?) Still, we would be well advised to set aside such minor discontents and take the message of this book seriously. We ignore it at (a small risk of) our (very great) peril. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His recent books include ''One World'' and ''The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/books/review/02SINGERL.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:33:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:33:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Word for Word | Susan Sontag: No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths Message-ID: Word for Word | Susan Sontag: No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths New York Times, 5.1.2 By CHARLES McGRATH SUSAN SONTAG, who died last week at the age of 71, was the pre-eminent intellectual of our time -visible, outspoken, engaged. The life of the mind was for her something both rigorous and passionate, moral and pleasurable, and she brought to it a lifetime of reading, watching and listening (she was a fixture at concerts and dance events) and a prose style of singular clarity and precision. Many of her essays were meditations of a sort, in which she brooded over something - the nature of camp, say, or the seductive power of photography - and then worked out her own thoughts and feelings. In the end, they were almost the same thing. Her ideas were deeply felt, her feelings deepened by reflection. She was by nature a fusionist - someone who could link high art and low, Patti Smith and Nietzsche - and a distruster of false or easy connections, like our way of using metaphor to talk about sickness. An excerpt from her unflinching essay "Illness as Metaphor" appears below, along with selections from other works. Against Interpretation, 1964 Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plentitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, or capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of a critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. Notes on Camp, 1964 I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion. Though I am speaking about sensibility only - and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous - these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is na?ve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One Culture and the New Sensibility, 1965 Having one's sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one's ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one's sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily. The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are "boring." But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people. But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contemporary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever. On Photography, 1977 The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to "fix" the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete. Illness as Metaphor, 1978 The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we're unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and the wish to be lied to; it does not touch the deepest dread. Someone who has had a coronary is at least as likely to die of another one within a few years as someone with cancer is likely to die soon from cancer. But no one thinks of concealing the truth from a cardiac patient: there is nothing shameful about a heart attack. Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded people afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer. Thirty Years Later..., 1996 I had come to New York at the start of the 1960's, eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in "everything." I had always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren't more people like me. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02word.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jan 2 20:36:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 15:36:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Safire: On Language: Personal or Private? Message-ID: On Language: Personal or Private? On Language by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 5.1.2 By WILLIAM SAFIRE In his year-end news conference, President Bush was asked if his relationship with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has been undermining democracy, had chilled. Bush replied, ''You know, it's complicated.'' Then he corrected himself: ''It's complex rather than complicated.'' After that surprising display of hairsplitting synonymy, he went on to explain what he meant by complexity: working with the Russians in sharing intelligence on terrorism while implicitly criticizing Putin for his recent centralization of power. Bush liked his choice of the word complex so much that he thrice returned to it moments later when asked about criticism of the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld: ''The secretary of defense is a complex job. It's complex in times of peace, and it's complex even more so in times of war.'' Simply put, the president rejects complications and is hooked on complexity. Let's examine the difference between those words. Complicated is a participial adjective rooted in the Latin for ''folded together.'' It has always had a slightly sinister connotation: ''There they lie,'' wrote the philosopher Henry Power in 1664, ''all dead, twisted and complicated all together, like a knot of Eels.'' Three years later, the poet John Milton, in ''Paradise Lost,'' wrote of a hellish scene, ''Thick swarming now/With complicated monsters.'' Over the centuries, the word's meaning was rehabilitated somewhat but still retains a primary sense of ''hard to unravel or explain; so intimately intertwined as to be confusing.'' Often it is used as an excuse for an inability to clearly define: to say, ''That's complicated,'' is to duck a question or to cover up ignorance of detail. Although complex, rooted in the Latin for ''encompass or embrace different elements,'' is also the opposite of ''simple,'' it does not seem to brush aside the questioner as one too easily confused. Complex means ''with interconnected parts; compounded of different elements; an intricate combination of ideas.'' In grammar, a complex sentence contains one or more subordinate clauses, like the one beginning ''Although,'' which puts the reader to sleep at the beginning of the paragraph that precedes this one. It is the opposite of the simple declarative sentence, like ''complex is usually a compliment.'' (In simplicity there is strength; in complex ity there are nuances running the risk of voter distrust; in complication there is danger of a need for drastic surgery to disentangle those linguistic eels.) PRIVATE VS. PERSONAL In his defense of the secretary of defense, Bush said, ''He has been around in Washington a long period of time.'' This is an example of lazy verbosity; Alistair Cooke used to deride Yanks who said, ''Welcome to the New York area'' or substituted on a daily basis for ''every day'' or Brits who said ''in two weeks' time.'' The president was sharp, however, when it came to getting personal: a reporter asked about his plan for ''private accounts'' among proposed changes to the Social Security system, and Bush began his response with ''As to personal accounts. . . . '' This past summer, at the Republican convention in New York, the former House majority leader Richard Armey took me aside at a fat-cat function and whispered, ''Personal is the word, not private.'' Sure enough, in all Republican presentations of elements of the future ''ownership society,'' the warm, almost cuddly word personal -- as in ''up close and personal,'' a phrase used in The Times in 1915 to describe the closeness of the Rev. Selden Delaney with his parishioners, later popularized as the title of a 1996 movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford -- is the term used to escape from private, a word that is the antithesis of public and is seen to offend most blue-state citizens. (That's a complicated sentence that wishes it were merely complex.) The private/personal synonyms have much in common with the complicated/complex pair. In both cases, the pair shares an antonym -- ''public'' for the former, ''simple'' for the latter -- and within each pair is a subtle separation by connotation. Private is from the Latin privatus, ''apart from the state,'' its meaning extended to ''belonging to the individual or interest and not owned by any government.'' As a noun, privacy has a good connotation (keep out of my computer, you prying cookie). As an adjective, however, private is often associated in political discourse with ''the truly greedy,'' as in ''private developers.'' Consequently, liberals deride the idea of setting aside a portion of the payroll tax destined for Social Security as the dreaded privatization, while conservatives like to call that percentage set aside a ''personal retirement account.'' Personal probably comes from the Etruscan phersu, ''mask,'' from which we get persona, an assumed character or ''image.'' With the rise of interest in the person, individual or self, personal took on an intimate character: we enjoy e-mail's personal correspondence on our personal digital assistants and grunt happily if wearily at the behest of our personal trainers. In a word, personal is in; impersonal can be an insult, and private -- especially in its verb form as privatize -- has more enemies in the media than friends. DEAR NEAR ''You have ruled out tax cuts,'' a reporter said to the president, ''and no cuts in benefits for the retired and the near retired.'' Then came the semantic zinger: ''What, in your mind, is 'near retired'?'' Bush half-answered that with a reference to ''our seniors,'' but let me deal with the dropping of the adverbial -ly and the overuse of near as a combining form. It became controversial with near miss, a nonsensical version of near thing; some of us patiently but uselessly pointed out that the writer meant ''near hit.'' Near miss has since entrenched itself as an idiom. (Idioms is idioms, and I could care less.) The abovementioned Vlad the Impaler refers to Russian speakers in the nations that broke away from the Soviet Union as the near abroad. And now we have Bush's near retired, presumably but not decidedly people approaching their 60's. Two paragraphs back, today's column was near finished. The compound nouns are chasing the adverbs out of the language. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02ONLANGUAGE.html From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Jan 2 20:54:12 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 12:54:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? References: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <016001c4f10d$38083f70$2900f604@S0027397558> At least George Bush received a concession speech from his two opponents, something that still hasn't occurred in Ukraine. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 10:23 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? > "George Bush will be the first man in US history to > serve two terms without being legitimately elected." > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 00:49:35 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 17:49:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? In-Reply-To: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F029.FC068E70.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D8969F.9030309@solution-consulting.com> Steve asked, apropos of "Jesus = Liberal" >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net Steve, excellent question. First, there is an evaluative process when a person sees / hears a propaganda message, such as "Who is saying this, why are they telling me this?" Successful propaganda must come from authorative sources. If you haven't established yourself as a scholar of christianity, the link rings terribly hollow. Symbols don't occur in vacuum; those that try to do so are irritating since they don't have the imprimatur of authority. Can you get the Pope to endorse the link (ex cathedra)? I doubt it. Second, when you use a universal iconic symbol, whom are you targeting? Liberals will already believe such links (Jesus = Liberal) whereas conservatives will be offended. They will say, and with considerable justification, that it is clear that Jesus revered life and were he here on earth today he would be revolted by the practice of abortion, something that liberalism tied itself to. One such contradiction will cause your Christian targets to reject the link. People in the middle - moderate christians - might be offended because if they have even a passing acquaintance with history, they know how people appropriate religious themes for selfish, destructive ends. That is an empirical question, of course, but such use of icons, especially by "out-group" people, are especially upsetting to the "in group." Have you established your bona fides as an in-group member? Third, scholars will immediately know that Libeal/Conservative labels do not apply to epochs other than our own. For example, to label Washington "liberal" creates much discomfort to those who have studied the early history of our country (Federalists = liberal? I don't think so!0 Republicans under Jefferson waged an intense hate speech campaign asserting that the Federalists were elitists who simply wanted a kind of big business aristocracy. Conservatives? But Hamilton expanded the Federal Government enormously, and instituted deficit spending. Liberals? Jefferson appealed to the masses and used emotional language much more than Federalists (liberal?) yet he hated and distrusted all government (conservative?). The issues weren't the same. The labels simply don't fit that era. Similarly, during the time of Jesus there were two "political" parties, the Sadducees and the Pharasees. They are not liberal or conservative, except by special pleading which makes the comparison invalid. Sadducees doubted life after death and were more inclusive (liberal?) and Pharasees were concerned with preserving traditional Judeism and were big on "letter of the law" (conservative?) but Jesus eschewed both sides. He tangled with both, and appeared to have no interest at all in political institutions. I speak as one who has read the New Testament dozens of times in various translations and two languages, and read several commentaries on the life of Jesus. So to label him that way immediately makes you lose any credibility in the eyes of people who know history and theology. If I could offer some advice, I would say drop the labels and use something that is already successful. The word"liberal" is so full of negative meanings to the majority of US citizens I don't think it can be redeemed for perhaps fifty years. Your efforts to redeem it will be seen as clumsy and manipulative. You as a source will be discounted. Piggyback on a successful idea. Take the tsunami devastation. A photo of the suffering with the (already successful) question, "What would Jesus do?" That is likely to produce a positive affective response from almost everyone.* *(Actually, he would probably say to ignore what governments do and take independent action, sacrificing your own purse to help those in need. He would be more pleased with the enormous church-based fund raising going on now than with forced contributions via taxes. Jesus never taught corporate response [Sinai covenant] but instead emphasized individual response [Elijah covenant], so Jesus says "sell all you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me" but only to the rich youth.). To me, one reason that liberalism has become morally bankrupt is that it substitutes the Sinai covenant for the Elijah /Christian covenant, and substitutes corporate action for individual virtue. I am not sure how you can overcome that, without changing the fundamentals of liberalism. Thanks for the question, Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >>From a social- or cognitive- science point >of view, what makes it offensive? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal > >Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 02:10:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 18:10:07 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Message-ID: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> Thanks for your comments. Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, evaluate this: Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Steve asked, apropos of "Jesus = Liberal" >From a social- or cognitive- science point of view, what makes it offensive? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net Steve, excellent question. First, there is an evaluative process when a person sees / hears a propaganda message, such as "Who is saying this, why are they telling me this?" Successful propaganda must come from authorative sources. If you haven't established yourself as a scholar of christianity, the link rings terribly hollow. Symbols don't occur in vacuum; those that try to do so are irritating since they don't have the imprimatur of authority. Can you get the Pope to endorse the link (ex cathedra)? I doubt it. Second, when you use a universal iconic symbol, whom are you targeting? Liberals will already believe such links (Jesus = Liberal) whereas conservatives will be offended. They will say, and with considerable justification, that it is clear that Jesus revered life and were he here on earth today he would be revolted by the practice of abortion, something that liberalism tied itself to. One such contradiction will cause your Christian targets to reject the link. People in the middle - moderate christians - might be offended because if they have even a passing acquaintance with history, they know how people appropriate religious themes for selfish, destructive ends. That is an empirical question, of course, but such use of icons, especially by "out-group" people, are especially upsetting to the "in group." Have you established your bona fides as an in-group member? Third, scholars will immediately know that Libeal/Conservative labels do not apply to epochs other than our own. For example, to label Washington "liberal" creates much discomfort to those who have studied the early history of our country (Federalists = liberal? I don't think so!0 Republicans under Jefferson waged an intense hate speech campaign asserting that the Federalists were elitists who simply wanted a kind of big business aristocracy. Conservatives? But Hamilton expanded the Federal Government enormously, and instituted deficit spending. Liberals? Jefferson appealed to the masses and used emotional language much more than Federalists (liberal?) yet he hated and distrusted all government (conservative?). The issues weren't the same. The labels simply don't fit that era. Similarly, during the time of Jesus there were two "political" parties, the Sadducees and the Pharasees. They are not liberal or conservative, except by special pleading which makes the comparison invalid. Sadducees doubted life after death and were more inclusive (liberal?) and Pharasees were concerned with preserving traditional Judeism and were big on "letter of the law" (conservative?) but Jesus eschewed both sides. He tangled with both, and appeared to have no interest at all in political institutions. I speak as one who has read the New Testament dozens of times in various translations and two languages, and read several commentaries on the life of Jesus. So to label him that way immediately makes you lose any credibility in the eyes of people who know history and theology. If I could offer some advice, I would say drop the labels and use something that is already successful. The word"liberal" is so full of negative meanings to the majority of US citizens I don't think it can be redeemed for perhaps fifty years. Your efforts to redeem it will be seen as clumsy and manipulative. You as a source will be discounted. Piggyback on a successful idea. Take the tsunami devastation. A photo of the suffering with the (already successful) question, "What would Jesus do?" That is likely to produce a positive affective response from almost everyone.* *(Actually, he would probably say to ignore what governments do and take independent action, sacrificing your own purse to help those in need. He would be more pleased with the enormous church-based fund raising going on now than with forced contributions via taxes. Jesus never taught corporate response [Sinai covenant] but instead emphasized individual response [Elijah covenant], so Jesus says "sell all you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me" but only to the rich youth.). To me, one reason that liberalism has become morally bankrupt is that it substitutes the Sinai covenant for the Elijah /Christian covenant, and substitutes corporate action for individual virtue. I am not sure how you can overcome that, without changing the fundamentals of liberalism. Thanks for the question, Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >>From a social- or cognitive- science point >of view, what makes it offensive? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2005 5:31 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Another well-known liberal > >Crude, but at least it is highly offensive . . . > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.jpeg >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00008.html >> << File: ATT00009.txt >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 95497 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 02:16:49 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:16:49 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41D8AB11.6060303@solution-consulting.com> RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by Crichton? I know, it has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, but he effectively discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being pushed by politics and not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems to be based on this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto treaty using actual peer-reviewed citations in his novel. The whole idea of putting lots of effort into avoiding an event that will not happen is delicious coming from an attorney/judge, since lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast implants cause no problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not doing caesarians) and creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good drug when taken with some precautions). More to the point, can we actually estimate probabilities? Five day weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather people have been predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- and so how can we predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a mini-black hole? Computer modeling is generally how we get such predictions, and such modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have seen. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 > By PETER SINGER > > CATASTROPHE > Risk and Response. > By Richard A. Posner. > 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 3 02:29:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 21:29:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP Outlook: What Will Be Essential in 2020? Message-ID: What Will Be Essential in 2020? [These articles were spread over three pages, B1-3, in today's Outlook section of the Washington Post, i.e., 5.1.2, each with its own URL.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40151-2004Dec31?language=printer What Will Be Essential in 2020? By Philip Kennicott If you're one of those people who use this season to clean up and throw out the accumulated baggage of another year, just take stock of how deeply a basic optimism pervades the house. In the kitchen, a little bit of desiccated saffron waits for the proverbial blue moon when you decide to color a pot of rice. On the bookshelf, Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" still inhabits its two inches of precious space, waiting for a long, undistracted summer to be given its due. In the closet, your youth hangs in between old winter coats and forlorn ties, waiting for the new you that will emerge from the gym and a regimen built on tofu and greens. There is an optimism so fundamental to life that we hardly notice its presence, an optimism of essentials: We hoard and we plan and we muddle on regardless of a world that gives us little reassurance about our future. Our world is constructed of ephemera -- technology and entertainment and celebrities -- that we know will come and go. And often it feels full of dreadful omens. But before the mind darkens contemplating that glass -- half full, or half empty? -- the body thirsts, simply, essentially. So the glass and the water precede the philosophical messiness of the human condition. And it is comforting, and chastening, from time to time, to work backward, from the anxieties and ambiguous portents of daily life to the basics. What is essential? What will remain essential in . . . oh, let us say 15 years? Outlook has put this question to six diverse writers. Our choices reflect, of course, our own most basic bias toward the essentials of life. We assume that a decade and a half from now we will still be essentially what we are today: mortal beings who struggle in the world to raise families, stay healthy, satisfy curiosity, amuse ourselves and leave behind us a record of who and what we were during our allotted time on the planet. It's never easy to answer this kind of question, which demands equal parts contemplation and speculation. And the question itself -- what is essential? -- is ultimately an elegant rephrasing of the most basic question we face: What is the meaning of our lives? But we ask it now because we are at a moment in American history that is filled with anxiety, and nothing allays fear like getting back to basics. Fifteen years ago, when laptops and portable phones were rare and unwieldy luxuries, not essentials, we saw the Cold War come to an end. Four years ago, at the end of a summer troubled by missing interns and marauding sharks, we saw the post-Cold War idyll shattered by terrorism. One of the things that went up in smoke that day was a crude kind of futurism -- fantasies of a technological golden age, theories of rapid new human evolution. Today, the language of the future has a dark edge to it. We live in a time not just of known unknowns, but unknown unknowns, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said, none too reassuringly. Remember the Long Boom? The theory put forth in the late 1990s that our big worry was no worries? That prosperity and technology and the end of the Cold War meant years, decades even, of troublesome peace and stability? Remember the end of history, Francis Fukuyama's hailing of a new post-ideological age, without the grand historical confrontations of the Cold War? Alluring ideas are not necessarily essential ones. But new ideas replace them, and some of them may prove more lasting. In producing the pages you see here, we have chosen a span of 15 years to make it manageable. Except for the very aged, who may be excused for worrying less about a time they will not see, we can all make out, if somewhat dimly, the year 2020 on the horizon. Thinking about someone else's future, a century from now, is pleasant sport, played without much responsibility; thinking about our own future requires more care and caution. Most predictions involve a little wish fulfillment (pundits are notorious for this), and the good that we wish for -- or the evil we would wish away -- says everything about who we would like to be. In the end, the particulars of what people today think will be essential in 2020 matter less than the exercise of pondering the question. It is an antidote to the myopia and chaos of our public life, a bulwark against Cassandra and Pangloss alike, against fear mongering and complacency. This centering question -- what is essential? -- is elemental to our spiritual and religious life, our daily habits, our arts and sciences, and yet seems all too often utterly absent from our political world. A politician who would confront the rabble of Scandal, Cant and Empty Symbols with a little impatience and a dismissive wave of the hand, saying, "that's not essential," might rise to the first rank of public life. But then again, politicians are not a breed apart, but a reflection of some part of ourselves, perhaps that part of us which, like Milton's Mammon, keeps looks and thoughts "downward bent," admiring the pavement and not the vaults of heaven. Perhaps in 15 years, if someone should return to these pages, everything he or she reads here will have been proved wrong. But a failure of prescience is not so lamentable as a failure of hope -- and by focusing on what will be essential, rather than what will change, we ground our speculation in hope. The future sketched here, even if it is not all that we would like it to be, is nevertheless one we expect to see. Author's e-mail: kennicottp at washpost.com Phil Kennicott, a staff writer for the Style section, is The Post's culture critic. --------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40155-2004Dec31?language=printer Some Dramatic Insight . . . Okay. It's 3 a.m. Lying on the sofa, you've drifted off into some flighty dream listening to the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . . only to be jolted awake by the static scream of the television set. If you remember nights like that, chances are you also remember losing your patience while trying to make an urgent call on a rotary phone. From UHF to satellite, VHF to Direct TV, the technological advances have been phenomenal, but they have accompanied a disturbing trend -- the evolution of the media as purveyors of entertainment rather than news, as investigators into celebrity lives rather than into current events. These changes leave me guessing what we will encounter in the next decades. Perhaps we will have put aside those 3-D glasses in favor of personal LCDs that will allow us to view news clips (indistinguishable from fiction) just centimeters from our eyes while riding the subway; or maybe we'll catch "click-a-flicks" in which one click of a ballpoint pen will project the latest blockbuster hit (with real politicians and celebrities morphed into the leading roles) onto any surface. Or should we look beyond PlayStation and Xbox and see that our obsession with gang violence, carjackings, presidential assassinations and sex is just the vulgar precursor to affective computer games that will make us feel as if we really are invading malls and churches or attacking public transportation systems as suicide bombers? As the media that once assumed the responsibility for educating and informing us devolve into mere entertainment, we shall, ironically, find ourselves looking to one of the oldest forms of entertainment -- theater -- to educate and inform us. What will be essential then will be to develop theater that does not yield to special effects in an effort merely to amuse but takes us places where we often do not want to go, the places of our most intimate personal fears and not just fear-fueled fantasies. It is in the political and social arena that the theater will thrive, tackling 2020's versions of the Columbine massacre, 9/11 and the Iraq war and compensating for the failings of our sources of news and information. We've seen this trend already, beginning with the works of playwrights Adrienne Kennedy and Ed Bullins in the 1960s and '70s and more recently with August Wilson, Kia Corthorn, David Hare and Tony Kushner. How will theater compete with the technologically driven media? Hip-hop moguls like Russell Simmons have already brought that genre as far as Broadway, expanding theater's boundaries. That's promising. At any rate, let's hope the stage can resist the cravings to pry into individuals' personal lives by creating reality theater. Let's hope we won't be inviting audiences to "go backstage and witness the uncensored drama" where the greenroom, the egos and the insecurities would all be put on display. Most likely, I think, is that, in a world where the news media will have been given over entirely to shock programming, theater will provide an essential forum for tackling the affairs of our nation. And there's no denying that current affairs are as dramatic as ever before. Theater may draw back the curtain to focus on the essential issues. Author's e-mail: TimothyJavon at msn.com By Javon Johnson, the author of 11 plays, including "Breathe" and "Hambone." -------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40153-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . and Portable Serenity Few industries are supposed to have more to look forward to than the travel industry. We hear that by the year 2020, the skies will be filled with gigantic double-decker airplanes, and everyone will be spending a sizable portion of their income and even their time going somewhere else. Despite these predictions, my guess is that more and more of us will find the confidence to stay at home, and that after peaking around 2015, the leisure travel industry will go into gradual but terminal decline. Weeds will grow in the atriums of the world's big airports and vast concrete hotels will stand empty by azure shores. We will by then have grasped what is essential to successful travel: We will have understood that our deepest problems and anxieties are not resolved by transporting ourselves somewhere else. The prospect of a vacation can usually persuade even the most downcast that life is worth living. Aside from love, few events are anticipated more eagerly, or form the subject of more enriching daydreams, than our vacations. They seem to offer us perhaps our finest chance to achieve happiness outside the constraints of work. During the long working weeks, we can be vitally sustained by our dreams of going somewhere else, a place with better weather, more interesting customs and inspiring landscapes -- a place where it seems we stand a chance of finally being happy. But of course the reality of travel seldom matches the daydreams. The tragicomic disappointments are well known: the sense of disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the arguments, the lethargy before ancient ruins. When we look at pictures of places we want to go and see (and imagine how happy we would be if only we were there), we are inclined to forget one crucial thing: that we will have to take ourselves along with us. That is, we won't just be in India/South Africa/Australia/Prague/Peru in a direct, unmediated way; we'll be there with ourselves, still imprisoned in our own bodies and minds -- with all the problems this entails. By 2020, we stand to recognize that our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic or material goods is critically dependent on first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, for self-expression and respect. We will not enjoy -- we are not able to enjoy -- sumptuous tropical gardens and attractive wooden beach huts when a relationship to which we are committed abruptly reveals itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment, or when we remember that our career is not heading in the direction we would like it to. The key ingredients of happiness remain stubbornly psychological. The travel industry conspires to make us forget this essential truth. It promises us that happiness can be attained by changing the color of the sky. But no one was ever cheered up by a beautiful location for longer than about 15 minutes -- unless, that is, they were ready to be happy anyway. By 2020, what will be essential to travel, if you must undertake it, is a calm heart and a satisfied mind, and an awareness that we cannot solve most of our ills by changing locations. For those who stay at home, Pascal's famous aphorism will be the guiding light: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Author's e-mail:adb at netcomuk.co.uk By Alain de Botton, the author of seven books, including "The Art of Travel" (Vintage), who lives in London. ----------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40152-2004Dec31?language=printer We'll Need a Threatometer . . . If you believe the sci-fi films of the 20th century, life in the year 2020 will indeed be much simpler -- either because we'll all be wearing spandex jumpsuits all the time, or because we'll all be living underground like cockroaches. But despite my natural tendency to think about the Worst-Case Scenarios ((TM) and ? Quirk Productions), I consider myself a realistic optimist. As a result, I think the future in store for us 15 years from now is unlikely to be dramatically different from the present -- just dirtier, multifunctional and miniaturized. So here's my short list of the essential gear for surviving in 2020: o EyePod Sunglasses. From AppleApparel, these special spectacles will not only screen out those increasingly nasty UV rays but will also filter out the visual and aural messages that will be assaulting us from all directions, via electronic billboards on everything from street signs to urinals. These glasses will be essential for maintaining sanity, focus and safe driving skills. They will also, however, allow the wearer to download music, videos and the latest episode of Dr. Phil. o Nasal filters. These will be standard issue due to air pollution, the ever-increasing threat of bioterrorism and the continued ubiquity of stick-on air fresheners. o Swiss Army Gloves. Repackaging the basics for human survival in the ultimately handy format. The 2020 model will include a compass, scissors, pocketknife, sewing kit, flint, magnifying glass, gas mask, water purifier, GPS-enabled satellite phone, web browser and, of course, a toothpick. o George Foreman Low-Fat Grill with Meat Thermometer/Terrorist Threatometer. The latest version will not only remove all the fat from a hamburger, but also monitor the color-coded alerts from the Homeland Security Advisory System, allowing you to decide in an instant if you need to eat and run. o Groomba. Indispensable in a time-challenged society: A tiny, spiderlike robotic grooming device that will trim your hair, shave you and give you a facial while you are sleeping. o MiVo. This microscopic camera implant will record your life onto a small hard drive in 30-minute segments. Via remote control, Homeland Security can use it to watch you packing your suitcase for a flight; or you can set it yourself to record a "season pass" of all family events, skipping the boring parts. o Beau-toxe. A new Botox-infused cologne that will simultaneously eliminate your wrinkles and attract the opposite sex. Essential? You be the judge. o Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. Still good for sooooo many things. Author's e-mail: david at quirkbooks.com By David Borgenicht, co-author of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" (Chronicle Books). ------------------------ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40147-2004Dec31?language=printer We'll Have to Use Data Wisely "You know more than you think you do," Benjamin Spock encouraged parents in the first line of "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care," more than half a century ago. Nowadays, when we think about all the information available to us at the tap of a finger and the flash of a screen, it sometimes seems that we know more than we ever thought we'd know about our children, ourselves, our health. The essential question is what to do with all that knowledge. By 2020, we will know much more, and the question of how to use that vastly expanded knowledge to make intelligent choices will be our health imperative. We already know an astonishing amount, at times more than we really can handle: Ask any parent who has had to make an agonizing decision about a fetus with a genetic problem, or any adult who has had to decide whether to be tested for Huntington's disease. Soon we'll understand much more, about a fetus, a baby, a child, an adult, about genetic susceptibility and risk, about predicting who might get heart disease, mental illness and certain types of cancer. You won't just say in a general way, oh yes, that runs in my family -- you'll be able to know specifically what runs, so to speak, in your veins. And the health challenge to us, as individuals, and as a society, will be what to do with this information, how to use it well and wisely at every level. "The whole world is going to see how cardiovascular disease, obesity-related disease, mental illness, how these major causes of death and morbidity arise in utero or in childhood, how they're multi-generational, and the challenge is how to interrupt these processes so people can live long and healthy lives," says Matthew W. Gillman, associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on long-lasting health effects of early human development. Most of the great advances in human health, he points out, are connected to public health improvement, to greater public hygiene or safety or greater understanding applied on a population-wide basis, to changes we make in our society or our environment that affect everyone. Our job will be to look for ways to use our increased information to improve the health of the population, as well as the health care of the individual. If we do this right, we'll pick our questions carefully, bearing in mind that a screening test is only valuable if a reasonable intervention is available. We're already doing it in certain areas, guided by family history: Hey, you have a high risk of cardiovascular disease, so modify your lifestyle and your diet in ways that will really change your odds! And you, over there, you have a higher-than-average chance of developing a hidden cancer, so you need to get yourself checked more often than most people. Well, imagine those pieces of advice to the nth degree, a custom-made set of lifestyle advisories so you don't end up like poor Uncle Al, or so that your sweet 1-year-old, who happens to share his genetic susceptibilities, doesn't take any baby steps in that direction. Or imagine a carefully tailored set of pharmaceutical recommendations about which drugs are likely to work well for you and which may be a little dangerous, all based on your genetic makeup. But doing this right will mean thinking not just about what will work for you, but about how this understanding of susceptibility, environment and prevention should help us shape our medical system and our social policy. If we do this right, it ought to mean sense and safety; if we push too hard and too egotistically, it could mean, unfortunately, a custom-made set of predictions, anxieties and paranoid, late-night hypochondrias, or the kind of anxious hovering over a child that leads to limited expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. Doing it right will mean using screening tests intelligently to pinpoint problems where early detection and prevention change the odds. Doing it right will mean learning to assimilate additional information about individual risk, and yet not letting that information limit our horizons. And above all, doing it right will mean thinking not only individually -- as privileged consumers of health care -- but for everyone, so that this information is available to all, so that we use what we learn about risk and prevention to make the world a little safer, improve our health care delivery as well as our health, and meet the challenge of staying healthy in 2020. By Perri Klass, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and co-author of "Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit In" (Ballantine). ------------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40145-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . See Today as the Past Like bulbs lying dormant in the ground before pushing their way to the surface, the forces ready to transform the world by 2020 are all around us, yet hidden. And like the bulbs, those forces already contain substance and direction that we who have planted them cannot clearly discern. For historians 15 years hence, it will be essential to work backward, from blossoms to roots. And when they do, they will undoubtedly have to sift through the implications of globalization -- whether to interpret it as the seed of a tighter world community or as the root of a profound, more pessimistic shift in the world and in the United States. America sailed into world prominence under the banner of progress. Buoyed by decades of material advances, 20th-century historians largely made it their task to explain how the United States became the richest and most powerful country in the world. Policymakers in the United States assumed then, as they do now, that a uniform human nature inspired all individuals, from childhood on, to strive for more goods. Discounting the crazy quilt of ethnic variety, our leaders have long seen people in all nations as yearning for a free enterprise economy and a democratic government patterned after the United States. So strong has been our sense of this ineluctable march forward that our nation has even resorted to military force to hasten globalization, American style. With this outlook, it has been easy to miss a great paradox that might be about to unfold: that the closer the peoples of the world draw together through communication, commerce and a shared commitment to human rights, the more they may claim their freedom to nurture distinctive ways. The homogenization of human societies, so evident in the closing decades of the 20th century, could come to an abrupt halt. That could be a positive thing. Building on sustainable, indigenous economies, countries could find ways to participate in a world community without sacrificing their distinctive customs. Coercion could give way to voluntary interaction; local decision-making could replace national and international centralization. Freed from equally smothering isolation or forced integration, human creativity and individual identity might flower in an era of plenty. However, historians in 2020 may be forced to explain a grimmer set of unintended consequences of globalization, starting with the plunge of the U.S. dollar, followed by the decimation of textile industries in developing countries no longer able to compete with China. A round of protective legislation restricting world trade could follow. Our innate selfishness, seen earlier as the basis for normal, healthy economies, could be our undoing as we disregard the consequences of our actions on the larger environment. The radiating effects of the vanishing rain forests could alter climates, thus drastically reducing food production. And astronomical prices for oil products might sap demand for industrial goods. The mutually reinforcing violence of terrorist groups engaged in relentless conflict with militarized, national regimes could make munitions the mainstay of industrial production. International cooperation in science and the arts might abate as fear of terrorists closed off access to the West's universities. And demographic trends will make it hard for Europe and the United States to support their own aging populations, much less provide poverty relief to keep overpopulated, underdeveloped countries from turning into seedbeds of intolerance and xenophobia. Now may be the time when essential choices are made about these future scenarios. In 2020, what will be essential is for historians to pinpoint the moment when either train of irreversible change -- one optimistic and one pessimistic -- passed the point of no return. They will know the outcome; we can only watch and hope. Author's e-mail: appleby at history.ucla.edu By Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of "A Restless Past: History and the American Public" (Rowman & Littlefield). -------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40146-2004Dec31?language=printer . . . And Nurture A New Generation Raising a successful child with just values is the most important human activity, and it will be as complex, demanding and fulfilling in 2020 as it is today. This mystical process cannot be reduced to a single essential ingredient, but one crucial factor that determines whether a child succeeds or fails is the presence of caring adults. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s in a racially segregated social order born of the ugly history of slavery. Fortunately for me, my parents and other adults never let the unjust external barriers become my internal ones. They provided buffers to combat a hostile world that told black children we weren't important. And they prepared me by precept and example to spend my life challenging that world. The changes from that time have been remarkable, and by 2020 the world will look very different from today. Many of our children will be parents, and they will find themselves enmeshed in a popular culture shaped by technological, social and economic forces hurtling past us before we even realize it. In such conditions, the need to instill in their children a set of ironclad core values -- honesty, integrity and service -- will become even more important. Adults hold a sacred trust to protect children from physical and spiritual poverty, violence and greed, and to show them how to care about something beyond themselves. Children need adult mentors in their homes, schools and communities who struggle to live what they preach. As the writer James Baldwin said, our children do not always do what we say, but they almost always do what we do. If we lie, children will. If we give nothing to the poor, they won't. If we don't vote, they will not fulfill their civic responsibilities as adults. If we tell or laugh at racial jokes, they will too. If we are violent and tolerate the glorification of violence, so will they. Our children tend to try to meet our expectations -- good or bad. They need adults who expect and help them to succeed. Parents need to teach children to respect others and themselves and to respond to people because they are good or wise or loving, not merely because they are powerful or rich. And adults need to stress nonviolent ways of resolving conflict in a violence-saturated world. Poor parents will need support to be good parents, meaning jobs with decent wages and health coverage in safe communities that offer educational opportunities for all. We know that America could harness its stupendous financial and intellectual treasure to break the cycle of poverty that limits our nation's progress and threatens our leadership in the world. Perhaps by 2020 the barriers that cause millions of children to fail will at last be cleared away. Author's e-mail: marian.edelman at childrensdefense.org By Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund. ----------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40154-2004Dec31?language=printer Quotes: Bare Essentials Scientific truth as an absolute value. -- Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and author of "The Ancestor's Tale" Vigilance against electronic snooping (and not just by governments). -- K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton professor and author of "The Ethics of Identity" Print. If for the past 400 years we'd been getting all of our info electronically, and somebody invented a way to put it on paper and deliver it to our doorsteps so we could read it in the back yard or bath or bus, people would say this new print technology is so wonderful it will replace the Internet. -- Walter Isaacson, president, Aspen Institute The ability to type. -- John McWhorter, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute As we develop "affective" computers, remembering that simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is not feeling, simulated love is never love. -- Sherry Turkle, director of the Initiative on Technology and Self, MIT The great privacy of sleep; ambiguous, haunting images that come to us in the night; warm beds. -- Colm Toibin, author of "The Master" The "Oxford Book of English Verse" and sunblock. -- Thomas Mallon, novelist and critic Sunscreen, strong encryption, noise-canceling earphones. -- Edward Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back" Sunscreen and a dictionary; everything else for a good life will be optional. -- Rami G. Khouri, executive editor, the Daily Star, Beirut Solar power and backyard vegetable gardens. -- Jeanne DuPrau, author of "The City of Ember" An organized health system for all, smaller serving portions (with a lot less calories and fat) and confiscatory tax levels on SUVs. -- Alfred Sommer, dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health A long-overdue law that will make the egregious habit of "personal blogging" a crime. -- Laura Zigman, author of "Animal Husbandry" The same thing that has been essential throughout civilization -- engineering that advances quality of life. -- Henry Petroski, Duke professor and author of "Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering" An understanding heart. -- Julia Alvarez, author of "Finding Miracles" Solitude. -- Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist, Sun Microsystems An awareness that globalism begins at home and that the "outside world," so-called, is in your front yard, your back yard, your living room and perhaps your bedroom. -- Pico Iyer, travel writer and author of "Sun After Dark" A working knowledge of Mandarin and English, and technologically sophisticated children to program household robots. -- Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University Basic knowledge of the Chinese language and history. -- Minxin Pei, director, China Program, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace A well-educated nation. -- Robert D. Ballard, discoverer of RMS Titanic Inclusiveness. -- Eugenio Arene, executive director, Council of Latino Agencies A more effective and expansive United Nations. -- J. Bryan Hehir, Harvard professor and former president, Catholic Charities Biometric ID cards, replacing passports, driver's licenses, national identification papers, proof of entitlement to pensions and state benefits and anything else we need ID for. -- Mary Dejevsky, chief editorial writer for London's Independent newspaper Complete genetic screening, which will allow prevention of most of the diseases known to man. -- Arthur Agatston, creator, South Beach Diet Cities remade to be beautiful and walkable. -- Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architect Mass transit. Wireless headsets. Gyms will require trainers to have a psychology degree, or they'll have a resident psychologist. -- Matt Berens, personal trainer Krispy Kremes. -- Michael J. McKenna, cycling class instructor Nineteen years into the war on terror, an essential in all homes, offices and cars will be portable and powerful personal electrical generators. -- Peggy Noonan, author, political commentator Patience. The lines will just keep getting longer. -- Dennis Nishi, illustrator Fluency in foreign cultures and an affordable cup of coffee. -- Amy Gutmann, president, University of Pennsylvania 1920s vintage clothing for centennial celebrations of the Harlem Renaissance and the ratification of the 19th Amendment. -- A'Lelia Bundles, author of "On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker" A sense of humor. -- Nigella Lawson, author of "How to Be a Domestic Goddess" Retirement. -- Charles Foehrkolb, MARC train conductor From checker at panix.com Mon Jan 3 02:36:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 21:36:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Did Kerry really say that? In-Reply-To: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F0B5.19FC52D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: He certainly did not. Kerry conceded gracefully, as did Algore. So did Nixon, when the Democrats in Texas and Chicago swung those states for the Democrats. It does not pay to be a sore loser. Some of his supporters say so, though. When you add up all the illegal motor voters and other illegal voters, the net was titled toward both Algore and Kerry. There was a book about all this by one of the Wall St. Journal writers. Frank On 2005-01-02, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > "George Bush will be the first man in US history to serve two terms > without being legitimately elected." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Jan 3 02:55:23 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:55:23 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? In-Reply-To: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F0F6.4ADD1380.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41D8B41B.5030605@solution-consulting.com> Steve, I hope this is helpful: I think you are preaching to the choir. Imagine three groups, right, center, left. Conservatives would not accept Stalin as one of them, of course, but would suggest he is closer to liberalism, since modern liberalism has been excessively influenced by socialism and Marxism. So conservatives would reject it out of hand. They are generally well educated, and some studies have shown that conservatives actually know more about history than liberals. (More later) Moderates would see this as manipulative and distrust it. You are using a label pejoratively, and they would say, "If he does that to conservatives, he will turn on us next!" E.g.: The label/photo violates the reciprocity/reversability principle: Would you want someone pushing pejoratively labeled photos attacking liberalism? Since that is one of the three ways to determine what is ethical, moderates will be repelled. They will see it as unethical. (rightfully so, IMHO) Only the liberals would see that with glee, and why are you catering to them? If you want to influence people, you have to base your communication on deep truth, not on arbitrary labels. What you fail to understand is that the sine qua non of conservatism is the notion that government cannot perfect humanity. It is one of the tenets of the faith (from reading history - ). Liberals seem to believe that government can help perfect society. Stalin had huge faith in government's ability to perfect humanity, hence his disasterous embrace of Lysenko, causing famines and deaths of millions of peasants. So Stalin is a liberal run amok. (So also: Hitler, same basic idea; for a similarly flavored idea, study the essay by Virginia Postrel on Forbes.com: Resilience vs. anticipation - free but registration required. If you can't find it, let me know) Have you read Radical Son by Horowitz? He can help you understand the actual conservative mind set, if you want to influence conservatives. If you want to influence moderates, you have to understand moderation. Read "How Good People Make Tough Choices" by Kidder. It will explain the three bases of ethical behavior and that will improve your communication. So far, your labeling does violate the reciprocity ('golden rule') principle. Would you approve of someone labeling Keynes as "baby killer" or FDR as "warmonger"? LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >Thanks for your comments. > >Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, >evaluate this: > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 04:36:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 20:36:07 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? Message-ID: <01C4F10A.B049A580.shovland@mindspring.com> I think the idea that global warming is primarily caused by man is suspect, but I have heard that there is global warming on Mars as well, suggesting that the entire solar system is heating up. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:17 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by Crichton? I know, it has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, but he effectively discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being pushed by politics and not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems to be based on this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto treaty using actual peer-reviewed citations in his novel. The whole idea of putting lots of effort into avoiding an event that will not happen is delicious coming from an attorney/judge, since lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast implants cause no problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not doing caesarians) and creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good drug when taken with some precautions). More to the point, can we actually estimate probabilities? Five day weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather people have been predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- and so how can we predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a mini-black hole? Computer modeling is generally how we get such predictions, and such modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have seen. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 > By PETER SINGER > > CATASTROPHE > Risk and Response. > By Richard A. Posner. > 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Jan 3 04:41:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2005 20:41:34 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Message-ID: <01C4F10B.7382E930.shovland@mindspring.com> Thanks for the book recommendations. The stack in my "reading room" is kind of tall at the moment, but I'll keep this for future reference. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:55 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? Steve, I hope this is helpful: I think you are preaching to the choir. Imagine three groups, right, center, left. Conservatives would not accept Stalin as one of them, of course, but would suggest he is closer to liberalism, since modern liberalism has been excessively influenced by socialism and Marxism. So conservatives would reject it out of hand. They are generally well educated, and some studies have shown that conservatives actually know more about history than liberals. (More later) Moderates would see this as manipulative and distrust it. You are using a label pejoratively, and they would say, "If he does that to conservatives, he will turn on us next!" E.g.: The label/photo violates the reciprocity/reversability principle: Would you want someone pushing pejoratively labeled photos attacking liberalism? Since that is one of the three ways to determine what is ethical, moderates will be repelled. They will see it as unethical. (rightfully so, IMHO) Only the liberals would see that with glee, and why are you catering to them? If you want to influence people, you have to base your communication on deep truth, not on arbitrary labels. What you fail to understand is that the sine qua non of conservatism is the notion that government cannot perfect humanity. It is one of the tenets of the faith (from reading history - ). Liberals seem to believe that government can help perfect society. Stalin had huge faith in government's ability to perfect humanity, hence his disasterous embrace of Lysenko, causing famines and deaths of millions of peasants. So Stalin is a liberal run amok. (So also: Hitler, same basic idea; for a similarly flavored idea, study the essay by Virginia Postrel on Forbes.com: Resilience vs. anticipation - free but registration required. If you can't find it, let me know) Have you read Radical Son by Horowitz? He can help you understand the actual conservative mind set, if you want to influence conservatives. If you want to influence moderates, you have to understand moderation. Read "How Good People Make Tough Choices" by Kidder. It will explain the three bases of ethical behavior and that will improve your communication. So far, your labeling does violate the reciprocity ('golden rule') principle. Would you approve of someone labeling Keynes as "baby killer" or FDR as "warmonger"? LJ Steve Hovland wrote: >Thanks for your comments. > >Now, with your mind viewed as a neural net, >evaluate this: > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 4:50 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] How can Steve be successful with propaganda? > > > << File: ATT00008.html >> << File: ATT00009.txt >> From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Jan 3 16:22:54 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 11:22:54 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] zero point energy, pilot waves, reality and von Neumann In-Reply-To: References: <5.2.1.1.0.20040608175218.00b9a3d0@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050103092454.01cbca58@incoming.verizon.net> Good morning, folks! This morning I feel I am finally beginning to make REAL sense of some of the real fundamental issues suggested by the subject line here. Some of you may wonder why it too me so long. But physics has become such a huge and tangled subject that being too quick to draw conclusions won't work so well any more. Sorting out the tangle, while maintaining high standards of understanding things, is not so easy. Clearly there are many basic themes which no one earth fully understands as yet. So let me start with zero point. I was cheered greatly when Jack started to emphasize the distinction between two KINDS of "energy from vacuum": (1) the more classical notion of zero point energy (ZPE) based effectively on the "(1/2)hw" terms which emerge in some formulations of quantum field theory (QFT) as H0- ::H0::, the raw free Hamiltonian versus the normal form of that Hamiltonian. (The exact same ZPE noise is assumed in texts on semiclassical models of quantum optics.) (2) more sophisticated but less definite ideas, such as vacuum breakdown or forces linked to dark energy or negative energy. Jack has not always treated other people in an optimal way -- but I think he is basically right that the first seems very unlikely, while the second has a very real chance of working out somehow, someday, if we can figure out what is going on more precisely and more completely. NEVERTHELESS -- even though I do not believe that the (1/2)hw noise is really there, the first major theme of my cond-mat 2004 paper is description of a chip that should be able to prove that it is there and exploit its energy **IF** it should be there. (I like the idea of trying to do full justice to alternative viewpoints even when I do not really believe them.) All the information I have received so far, in feedback from that paper, has been very encouraging. (However, I do have some concern that the chip simulation and design work should at least include quantum effects in chips enough to reflect such basic parameters as coherence length of the radiation. Not all E&M or chip simulators do that. I think we are on course to do it right, but in real-world engineering one must be careful not to make too many assumptions.) Such a chip would be important scientifically, and possibly even useful, if it does work, even if (1/2)hw ZPE does not exist. Why am I so very, very skeptical that the (1/2)hw stuff is there? I'm sure that Hal Puthoff has heard many reasons -- but mine go a bit beyond what he has heard. Someone on Jack's lists said a long time ago that "of course the vacuum noise is there; it explains stuff like Lamb shifts, and we can't escape that. Read..." (By the way, Jack, feel free to repost this on the most relevant lists. With the caveat that it does not represent my employers or anyone else, and that it should be understood as informal Saturday morning stuff.) I was very puzzled by that statement -- but went back to other business. This week I think I understand what the key misunderstanding there was. I was very lucky to have learned QFT initially from Mandl's old but concise textbook Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. (I think there is a kind of updated paperback version available from amazon, but I haven't bought it.) He simply lays out in a step by step way what all the main contributions to the Lamb shift were back in the old days, and shows the Feynman diagrams for each contribution. When you look at the actual calculation, laid out in a straightforward and concise way, it is crystal clear that every term results from using the normal form Hamiltonian, ::H::, and that the supposed (1/2)hw terms have no relation at all to the results. But -- this past month, since Mandl is back at work, I looked at some other books to review the Lamb shift stuff. And I was astounded to see that another very standard text by Bjorken and Drell really does invoke intuitive (1/2)hw arguments, and describes how it is following the original historic development of the understanding of Lamb shifts. A more modern canonical treatment in Weinberg's QFT text is so utterly formal that it does not provide clear intuition one way or the other. Probably the generation of physicists who learned QFT from Boglyubov or Zuber would know what I learned from Mandl's text, but it seems that a lot has been lost here and there. Likewise -- the old papers by Coleman and Mandelstam on Sine-Gordon and Massive Thirring Model show a very clear and strong understanding of the role of the NORMAL FORM Hamiltonian in quantum field theory. Coleman seems to adopt the attitude that of course everyone knows that the normal form Hamiltonian is what we use, in all field theories, so it is beneath our dignity to emphasize the point... but in fact, a lot of the best people in axiomatic field theory do not really know, and it is not always spelled out in the textbooks. It is as if people were working in group theory and forgot to mention half the axioms, and didn't really care about the resulting confusion. As for the OTHER concepts of energy from vacuum ... I think we need to know/understand more about how such things work, before we can harness them. And that's why it's important for more of us to work on the basic understanding... -------------- Pilot waves.... I have to admit I feel a bit of envy for those of you who have had a chance to really work with people like Vigier (really, De Broglie), Hoyle and Sudarshan. Gold is not Hoyle and Vigier was not DeBroglie, but they do represent some very critical understanding. I did have the pleasure of good correspondence with DeBroglie many years ago... and I regret that it took so long for me to make sense of questions that he and I both felt the same about. People become annoyed when they need to keep asking the same question for more than a decade or two... but if it hasn't been answered yet, we still have to face up to it. (Of course, some would say we can always give up on reality and go pray in a monastery, but even the abbots might question that approach.) Once we allow for backwards-time effects, all the Bells Theorem objections to a local realistic model of physics go away. (See my quant-ph papers for lots of explanation.) But how does one represent the electron then? The electron as just a wave does not make sense. DeBroglie was clear about that long ago, and his book with Vigier remains reasonable on that point. Furthermore, the kind of statistical behavior we get from continuous wave fields matches BOSONIC QFT, not fermionic. (Again, see quant-ph. See also chapter 4 of Walls and Milburn, and chapter 3 of Howard Carmichael's book on statistics of quantum optics. I really do HIGHLY recommend studying both those chapters. This empirically-grounded work has an element of reality and clarity far beyond what I have seen in texts which are supposedly more general. Yet it is far more solid and theoretically grounded than more seat-of-the-pants optics work.) And finally, the electron self-energy renormalization and "Rutherford scattering" analysis of the electron all looks a lot more like a point particle; it doesn't fit the idea of a smooth soliton big enough to explain the mass of the electron (and it doesn't explain how the electron would hold together anyway in the face of self-repulsion). DeBroglie was equally clear that a pure point particle model does not work either, because of the well-known double slit (actually diffraction grating) kind of experiment. Since neither model of the electron could work, he simply proposed a kind of COMBINATION -- a "point particle" (actually, a tiny zone of nonlinear energy concentration) and a "pilot wave" (actually an asymptotic linearized solution of the nonlinear wave equations), BOTH propagating over ORDINARY 3+1-D Minkowski space-time. Again, his book with Vigier was quite clear. Only much later, as DeBroglie failed to find a good account for the spectrum of helium, did people like Bohm and even Vigier start to "defect to Fock space" because of the difficulty of OPERATIONALIZING De Broglie's vision. How to translate the VISION in the book by DeBroglie and Vigier into real mathematics, without defecting to Fock space? Again, my papers in quant-ph, the chapter in Walls-Milburn and the chapter in Carmichael, all develop the kind of mathematics which really makes it possible to operationalize all this -- FOR BOSONIC QFTs. (Section 3e of my cond-mat 2004 paper fills in a critical gap, and the 1984 paper in Physics Reports by Hillery, OConnell, X and Wigner is also critical. OConnell is alive and well in Louisiana, and might have something to contribute here.) Now... here is a critical point, which I see very clearly today. The original DeBroglie idea of a continuous pilot wave and a nonlinear "core" -- approximated as a continuous field and a point particle -- WILL NOT WORK in getting us to derive the predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED). It will not work because the continuous pilot wave as DeBroglie envisioned would HAVE to be quantized in a bosonic form. Even as an approximation it is not adequate. The physics is fundamentally different. After a lot of very complex OTHER analysis, my conclusion is as follows: the only mathematics which works is to assume that the "pilot wave," instead of being a normal continuous field, is a highly chaotic kind of wave motion, analogous to the wave form of ordinary AM radio waves, where two frequencies are BOTH present. The duality of "wave-like" (more continuous) and "particle-like" (very small radius) behavior of the electron can be explained as a duality very similar to that between the high (RF) and low (audio) frequencies in an ordinary radio wave. ---------------------- Of course, these words -- like the book of DeBroglie and Vigier itself -- require a mathematical formulation to be of any value whatsoever. In fact... it is the analysis of the mathematics which led me to believe these words. The mathematics is what I begin to understand more clearly today. ------------ Back in the quant-ph papers, I reasoned as follows. If a realistic continuous field model has exact equivalence to any desired BOSONIC QFT -- we could explain the success of the standard model of physics in neoclassical terms by finding a bosonic quantum field theory equivalent to the standard model. There is a HUGE mainstream literature on "bosonization" and "nuclear democracy" and "duality" which suggests that this should not be too hard. For example, Vachaspati (see arXiv.org) has lots of papers on a bosonic dual standard model. However -- when you really try to rely on the mainstream, you learn of its feet of clay even more than you do from a distance... In the end...after hundreds of papers... it all seems to come back to the old idea of Alfred Goldhaber (and Wilczek) that sometimes a bound state of two bosonic magnetic monopoles ends up being a fermion. I have seen lots of nice abstract reasoning about this... but not earthy examples. To construct a real (and reliable) theory we need earthy examples. (And Schwinger's way of generalizing monopoles into "dyons" is important in extending this, in principle, as are many ideas in The Skyrme Model by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk.) So we need a more constructive mathematical version of these ideas. One might ask: "why do you bother with all this? Why not just represent the electron as a point particle, in the obvious and natural mathematical implementation of the ideas in section 3e of your cond-mat 2004 paper?" There are two main reasons why I don't regard this as the most promising approach: (1) point particle QED MUST be represented as a kind of limit (as in QED regularization itself!), because of things like infinite electron self-repulsion -- and we need a rational basis for choosing a "regularization,' in effect; and (2) there are still the old DeBroglie arguments against a classical type of point particle model. After learning to think in terms of coherent fields, as in quantum optics and bosonic statistics... it takes some adjustment to get back into particle-like thinking again. For example, we must recall that: psi(x1,s1; x2,s2;... xn,sn) = psi1(x1...sn)*psi2(x1...sn) defines a totally symmetric (bosonic) wave function when psi1 and psi2 are totally antisymmetric (fermionic). When electric charge is like a totally conserved and quantized topological charge, we can safely "truncate" or project the statistics of a bosonic field into subspaces of "definite charge." Thus the statistics of the classical bosonic field theory basically give us something a lot like traditional "one electron" (or "N" electrons for a charge of N) wave functions, EXCEPT that we must include virtual electron/positron pairs, which are no different from what QED really assumes. One way of interpreting Goldhaber's ideas more constructively is to say... a bound state of two monopoles is a lot like a simple hydrogen atom, a bound state whose wave function can be represented as the PRODUCT of "two wave functions," because of the way that the separation of variables works. THIS IS NOT like the kind of multiplication of wave functions that QM typically uses for two uncoupled particles; it is just an artifact of the way we exploit separation of variables. The key idea here is as follows: for a continuous nonlinear field theory, like the classical Skyrme model or a system of two bound classical dyons, we may find no TRUE separation of variables, but we MAY find a separation of variables at asymptotic distances from the core or center of the system (aka chaotic soliton). Thus in the asymptotic limit, or as "soliton radius r goes to zero", the set of solutions for the system OR FOR the matrix of statistical covariances of the system, my converge to a product, like psi=psi1*psi2, where psi1 is "broad" (like the center of gravity wave function for a nonlocalized hydrogen atom) and psi2 is "narrow" (like the wave function of electron RELATIVE to proton in that hydrogen atom). Even if psi is naturally a single-valued function, it may happen to be REPRESENTED as a product of two two-valued (fermionic) functions in this process. Thus the mysterious fermionic weirdness discussed by Goldhaber and by Makhankov, Rybaov and Sanyuk may be disentangled and presented in a more straightforward Von-Neumann-like way by deriving it in this kind of context. Yes, we still have to consider spatial rotations in explaining why CERTAIN PDE yield these kinds of asymptotic solutions, but this is how it works. And then.. translating it into a physical picture... it is almost like saying the electron is really more LIKE a point particle, but that it uses a kind of AM radar system to pilot itself through double slits and the like. The fact that the math works out is what ultimately guarantees the match to experiment... and we do need to take all this and get the equations all down on paper and so on. (One more week of vacation left to me... maybe enough, maybe not...). The word "chaotic" sounds messy .. but the analysis in terms of matrices of statistical moments is extremely orderly. And then, another curious issue emerges. IN THIS CONTEXT, a very different kind of "zero point" fluctuation becomes much more interesting and plausible as a modification of the basic model I have just outlined. In the "nonlinear core zone" of such a chaotic electron model, a very special kind of white noise in space (limited to what perturbs the core zone locally) or thermal fluctuation across space-time becomes possible. Normally, in fields, simple diffuse white noise is very messy, because of issues of positive-definiteness of covariance matrices in Minkowski space (whose metric is not definite in sign). But within "world line" (or, better, world-channels) of massive particles like electrons, it is a different story. Can this be made mathematically meaningful an relativistic? Sure: consider additions to curvature of a world-line. I wonder whether this addition to the model may be crucial, in the end, to really understand what goes on in tunneling, at the Josephson junction. Perhaps a lot of that rigorous work by Kunio Yasue on stochastic point electrons may indeed turn out to be crucial piece of the final rigorous unified story here. But.. one step at a time. All of this needs to be put down mathematically (the no-noise and particle-noise versions), and used to fill in the details of part 3e of cond-mat 2004. If any of you can do this better or faster than I, I will be delighted (at least if you do cite the useful but incomplete contribution I have made so far). Given the approach of return to work, and return to some rather urgent life-or-death government policy issues... I may not have time to fill in all details here. Happy New Year... Paul P.S. For the "thermal" variation of the particle-noise idea, I have one image of treating collisions in space time in a way analogous to today's treatments of molecules in space, in closing a stoichiometric kind of statistical argument. In the end, it may all be a kind of approximation, as is traditional first-order chemical thermodynamics... but it may be very useful as a starting point, in much the same way. Before we can get to second order thermodynamics -- as in cond-mat 2004 chips! -- we must develop the space-time analogue of first-order thermodynamics! At least, that is one possible way to go, after the simpler noise-free fermionic PDE statistics are worked out per the asymptotic separation of variables concepts. And of course, the separation of variables is not isotropic in this case. Like a classical dipole expansion. From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Jan 3 16:57:04 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 08:57:04 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? References: <01C4F10A.B049A580.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <010401c4f1b5$41bd0de0$0a00f604@S0027397558> Let's keep an eye on Mars as it warms up. Shortly we earthlings will need to make a move and Mars might be one good place to homestead. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 8:36 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? >I think the idea that global warming is primarily > caused by man is suspect, but I have heard > that there is global warming on Mars as well, > suggesting that the entire solar system is > heating up. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2005 6:17 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Posner) > 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? > > RE: Catastrophes, have you read State of Fear by > Crichton? I know, it > has all the typical weaknesses of a Crichton novel, > but he effectively > discounts global warming as a pseudo-fact being > pushed by politics and > not science. So Posner's argument about warming seems > to be based on > this pseudo-science. Crichton demolishes the Kyoto > treaty using actual > peer-reviewed citations in his novel. > > The whole idea of putting lots of effort into > avoiding an event that > will not happen is delicious coming from an > attorney/judge, since > lawyers are twisting science (silicone breast > implants cause no > problems; Cerebral palsy is not caused by OBs not > doing caesarians) and > creating imaginary risks (Vioxx is a perfectly good > drug when taken with > some precautions). > > More to the point, can we actually estimate > probabilities? Five day > weather predictions are a joke -- the local weather > people have been > predicting huge snowstorms that never materialized -- > and so how can we > predict whether a particle accelerator can produce a > mini-black hole? > Computer modeling is generally how we get such > predictions, and such > modeling has been 'way off, at least the ones I have > seen. > > Lynn > > > > Premise Checker wrote: > >> 'Catastrophe': Apocalypse When? >> New York Times Book Review, 5.1.2 >> By PETER SINGER >> >> CATASTROPHE >> Risk and Response. >> By Richard A. Posner. >> 322 pp. Oxford University Press. $28. >> > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:19:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:19:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Basque Talk of Secession Creates Crisis for Madrid Message-ID: Basque Talk of Secession Creates Crisis for Madrid New York Times, 5.1.3 By RENWICK McLEAN MADRID, Jan. 2 - The Basque region's declaration last week that it has the right to secede from Spain has pushed Prime Minister Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero toward the first crisis of his tenure, political analysts say. Throughout his nearly nine months in office, Mr. Zapatero has largely promoted policies that are solidly supported by the Spanish public, helping him to avoid major setbacks or controversies. But editorial writers and politicians say his affinity for following the polls has kept him from taking on tough issues, chief among them the growing signs in recent months that the Basque region was moving toward an overt challenge to the central government's authority. "Now it's time for him to respond," said an editorial in the Madrid daily El Mundo. "The coherence and decisiveness of his answer will determine not only his own political future, but also the survival of the current federal model endorsed by the Spanish people." The political principles invoked by Mr. Zapatero in his previous policy decisions offer little guidance on how he will handle this challenge, analysts say. Since taking office in April, Mr. Zapatero has emphasized that the central policy of his government is to follow the will of the people. But now he finds himself staring at a possible constitutional standoff with a man making the very same claim. Juan Jos? Ibarretxe, the president of the self-proclaimed Basque Country and the driving force behind last week's declaration, says he is simply being a good democrat by proposing that the future of the region he governs should be decided by its people and not by Madrid. As the leader of a democratic government, he says, he must follow the principle of majority rule. Mr. Zapatero has used the same argument to fend off criticism of many of his policies, from withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq to sanctioning gay marriage. The looming conflict between the men in many ways reflects an age-old question posed by democracy: What are the rights and powers of the minority in a system based on majority rule? The United States fought a civil war in part to resolve the question, after Southern states said that since they had freely joined the union, they were free to leave it. The situation in Spain is not nearly as dire, but the question is similar: Can the Basque region unilaterally alter its relationship with Madrid, even secede, if a majority of its people want to? Mr. Zapatero says that the answer is clearly no, contending that the Spanish Constitution forbids it. But Mr. Ibarretxe says that at the end of the day the central government's opinion is irrelevant. If neither budges, Spain could be thrown into a genuine constitutional crisis, the analysts say. Mr. Ibarretxe has tried to ease tensions by pointing out that he is not proposing outright independence from Spain. But many political analysts wonder why the Basque region would risk angering Madrid by stating that it has the right to secede if it does not intend to do so. Some experts say Basque leaders are using the talk of secession only as a threat to persuade the central government to give them greater autonomy. In fact, many politicians, even some of Mr. Ibarretxe's allies, say outright independence makes little sense with Spain's growing integration into the European Union. "In a Europe where states are disappearing," said Josu I?aki Erkoreka, a representative in Parliament of the Basque Nationalist Party, "it doesn't make sense to propose a political model that is based on an old reality." Even if independence is not the goal, the Basque declaration last week demands immediate attention from Mr. Zapatero, political analysts here say. "This is without a doubt the greatest challenge presented to the Spanish state and the democratic parties since the transition" to democracy after the death of Franco in 1975, the editorial in El Mundo said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/international/europe/03madrid.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:20:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:20:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Communications: Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate Message-ID: Communications: Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate New York Times, 5.1.3 By JOHN SCHWARTZ As the horror of the South Asian tsunami spread and people gathered online to discuss the disaster on sites known as Web logs, or blogs, those of a political bent naturally turned the discussion to their favorite topics. To some in the blogosphere, it simply had to be the government's fault. On Democratic Underground, a blog for open discussion and an online gathering place for people who hate the Bush administration, a participant asked, "Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the 'bones' of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?" The cause of the earthquake and resulting killer wave, the writer said, could be the war in Iraq. "You know, we've exploded many millions of tons of ordnance upon this poor planet," the writer said. "All that 'shock and awe' stuff we've just dumped onto the Asian part of this earth - could we have fractured something? Perhaps the earth was just reacting to something that man has done to injure it. The earth is organic, you know. It can be hurt." The ridicule began immediately. Online insults, referred to colloquially as flames, rose high on other sites. "What would life be without D.U.?" asked an editor at Wizbang, a politically conservative blog (www.wizbangblog.com), using the initials of Democratic Underground. "Get out the tin foil hats," a contributor to the blog wrote. The interplay between the sites, left and right, is typical of the rumbles in cyberspace between rivals at different ends of the political spectrum. In many ways, Web logs shone after the tsunami struck: bloggers in the regions posted compelling descriptions of the devastation, sometimes by text messages sent from their cellphones as they roamed the countryside looking for friends and family members. And blogs were quick to create links to charities so that people could help online. But the blogosphere's tendency toward crackpot theorizing and political smack down could not be suppressed for long. "It's so much of what they feed on, so much of what they are," said James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds." Blogs have gone from obscurity to ubiquity in a blink. Bloggers were selected as "People of the Year" by ABC News, and Merriam-Webster declared "blog" its "word of the year." According to a study released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than eight million Americans have started blogs, and 27 percent of Internet users surveyed said they read blogs - a 58 percent jump since last February - and 12 percent of Internet users have posted comments to blogs. Still, 62 percent of Americans say they are not sure what the term "blog" means. Odd blog postings are not just for commoners. Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, posted a message in French to his Web site, www.norodomsihanouk.info, saying that an astrologer had warned him that an "ultra-catastrophic cataclysm" would strike the region, but Cambodia would be undamaged if the proper rituals were observed. King Sihanouk said that the thousands of dollars he spent on the ceremonies protected his nation from the disaster, and that he would donate $15,000 to disaster relief. Mr. Surowiecki pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. "There were always cranks," he said. "Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues." Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today's speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions. But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers. What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, "Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time ... How would you explain them?" Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources. "Not to make fun, as I'm sure it's not a unique misconception ... but the reality is simple plate tectonics," one participant wrote. "The entire Pacific Ocean is slowly but surely closing in on itself. What happened is that the floor of the Indian Ocean slid over part of the Pacific Ocean, releasing massive tension in the Earth's crust. "That's it. No mystic injury to the Gaia spirit or anything." Online discussion can evolve toward truth, said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University and a blogger. One result is a process that can be more reliable than many new media, where corrections are often late and small, if they appear at all. Dr. Shirky said the key to reasonable discussion was to get beyond flames and the "echo chamber" effect of like-minded people simply reinforcing the opinions of one another and to let the self-correcting mechanisms do their job in a civil way. "You hope the echo chamber effect and the fact-checking effect will balance out into a better and more nuanced set of narratives, and a more rigorously checked set of facts," he said. But in such a sharply contentious world, "The risk is it will largely divide itself into competing narratives where what even constitutes a fact is different in different camps." To Xeni Jardin, an editor of BoingBoing.net, the "self-healing" quality of debate is one of the most important results of the electronic medium. "When information that is provably untrue surfaces on the Net or surfaces in discussion groups, people want to be right - they want to know the truth," she said. In her own blog, she said, "Sometimes people spend really a long time researching background information on an item that we post" and correct the record through comments. In the tsunami discussion on Democratic Underground, some participants continued to post farfetched theories about what caused the earthquake based on pseudoscience and conspiracy, and on Wizbang, the vituperation continued unabated, spreading even to many victims of the disaster. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/international/worldspecial4/03bloggers.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:21:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:21:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Magazine: Heavy Questions Message-ID: Heavy Questions New York Times Magazine, 5.1.2 By ELIZABETH WEIL The road changes just past the Starr County sign. The shoulder disappears, the grass is left uncut and the black-eyed Susans and big pink Texas sage have to compete with the orange traffic cones set out by the border patrol. Just two counties up from the Texas tip, where the flood plains along the Rio Grande change to rolling hills and eroding cliffs, Starr County, largely Mexican-American, is one of the poorest counties in the nation. Fifty-nine percent of its children live below the poverty level, and in the strange new arithmetic of want, in which poverty means not starvation but its opposite, it is also one of the fattest. In the colonias on the edge of Rio Grande City -- jerry-rigged neighborhoods that are home to many illegal immigrants and lack adequate municipal services -- houses that look as if they might fall down neighbor houses that look like fortresses, a result of the boom-and-bust drug economy. Little gorditos run around in juice-stained diapers, and as the kids get older, they only get fatter. By the time they are 4 years old, 24 percent of the children are overweight or obese; by kindergarten, 28 percent; and by elementary school, 50 percent of the boys are overweight or obese, along with 35 percent of the girls. The concern is not just cosmetic. Overweight children are at significantly greater risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, and by early adulthood, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, breast cancer, gallbladder disease, arthritis and sleep apnea. ''Stop by any time,'' said the local school district superintendent, Roel Gonzalez, inviting me to visit. The child of migrant farm workers, Gonzalez is perhaps the children's greatest advocate and the community's greatest critic. ''I will take you down the hall in any one of my schools, and you will see most of the children aren't slim anymore; they're all beefy. Kids are 30, 40 pounds overweight already, and they're only in high school. We're basically walking time bombs.'' The burden of childhood obesity is one created by adults and borne by children, and while the problem is widespread in America, there are few places where the children are lumbering under the load the way they are in Starr County, the point on the U.S. map where all the vectors that lead to obesity form a tidy asterisk. Some reasons are clear and well documented, but others are less transparent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, rates of childhood obesity are among the worst in the Mexican-American population, and Starr County is 98 percent Mexican-American. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, among other sources, also shows that as socioeconomic status falls, rates of childhood obesity rise, and Starr County is desperately poor. Not only is Starr County in Texas -- one of the fattest states in the Union -- but it is also on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fattest part of Texas. The overall effect is devastating: almost half the adults in Starr County have Type 2 diabetes. A child is considered at risk if a close family member -- mother, father, sibling, aunt, uncle -- has diabetes, meaning virtually every child in Starr County is at risk of contracting the disease. Complicating matters, self-discipline is typically not a hallmark of the school-age years. When you talk to children about losing weight, ''you see a blank stare,'' Gonzalez said. ''They hear you, but there's really not anything they can do.'' Vans of well-meaning doctors regularly barrel down from San Antonio and Houston, feeling the smooth blacktop change to bumpy gravel as they near their destination and knowing that if nothing changes soon, if the children continue to put on ever more pounds, they will be responsible for having watched over the first generation of American children to have shorter expected life spans than their parents. During the 2003-2004 school year, Peggy Visio, special projects coordinator for the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, made 13 trips to Rio Grande City, the largest town in Starr County. Visio, who specializes in diabetes prevention, worked previously with Sioux Indians in South Dakota, and her university recently received a grant from a private donor enabling her to start a program in the Rio Grande Valley. Beginning last January, Visio screened 2,931 elementary-school children, assuming she'd find about 600 at high risk for diabetes. Instead she found 1,172. Forty-five families volunteered to enroll a child in her program, a combination of weekly nutrition and exercise classes, plus two sessions of lab work to measure each child's height, weight, blood pressure and blood sugar and to examine each child for signs of diabetes. As part of the project's design, half of the families met with Visio and her staff in person, and half met via video link in order to test the efficiency of telemedicine -- that is, seeing a doctor, nurse or nutritionist remotely. (All participants came to the lab in person.) Starr County has 15 physicians; the ratio of residents to doctors is 3,412 to 1. (The statewide ratio is 661 to 1.) There are no behavioral therapists or pediatric dietitians in Starr County. The nearest pediatric endocrinologist lives about 70 miles from Rio Grande City. One of the first things Visio did when she started the Diabetes Risk Reduction via Community-Based Telemedicine program, or Dirrect, in Starr County was to analyze the food served in the Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District, where all children receive both free breakfast and free lunch; so many qualified that it was easier just to serve everybody. The food service is run by Edna Ramon, who is 80 years old and began her job nearly two generations ago when malnutrition, not obesity, was the district's main problem. Ramon still talks about her memories of the dry hair and bony hands she saw on the children in the district in those early days. Visio analyzed Ramon's menus and quickly established that with breakfasts containing as many as 600 calories and lunches with 800, every child was on track to gain at least nine pounds during the school year. In addition, children were drinking huge quantities of sugary drinks -- sodas, fruit drinks and sports drinks -- which they bought from vending machines and at convenience stores and also drank at home. In the two months between her first two visits -- between initially screening the children and starting the program itself -- the children gained an average of two pounds. Visio also found at the outset that 13 percent of the prekindergarten and 18 percent of the kindergarten students she screened had acanthosis nigricans, a disorder characterized by dark, thick patches on the skin. Acanthosis nigricans can signal insulin resistance, warning of diabetes, a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin. Insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, controls the level of sugar in the body and helps the body use glucose as fuel. Excess fat tissue and insufficient muscle, which come from a lack of exercise, predispose a person to diabetes. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness and loss of limbs; many of the children she found with acanthosis nigricans had never been to a doctor. Visio -- an intensely organized and practical 47-year-old woman who makes spreadsheets of her own children's after-school activities and who cooks meals on Sunday for the entire week -- was deeply worried and deeply frustrated. ''People who were supposed to be helping these children'' -- school nurses, school food-service officials, even parents -- ''were teaching them the wrong things. They wanted to make the children happy by giving them what they wanted. It was making the children sick.'' According to Nancy Butte, director of the Viva la Familia Project at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 40 to 60 percent of the prevalence of childhood obesity in the Hispanic population can be attributed to genetic factors. ''Much has been written about children who are overweight,'' said Butte, explaining her study, ''but little is known about why Hispanic children in particular tend to be more at risk for obesity.'' Many believe that there is, most likely, a set of genes that makes some people more susceptible than others. Butte suggests that at least part of the genetic component may be related to ''the thrifty-gene hypothesis,'' the theory that some combinations of chromosomes create a situation in which cells are more inclined to store calories efficiently for times of scarcity. Some researchers have speculated that because many Mexican-Americans are descendants of American Indian hunter-gatherers, who evolved to store fat more easily for times of famine, those living a sedentary life in modern westernized societies with access to fast food may be more prone to gain weight. Butte has embarked on a five-year program of intensive metabolic and physiological testing, taking blood samples from Hispanic children and their parents, scrutinizing how children metabolize calories and analyzing body composition. She explained that the self-reported data she collected did not show great differences in calorie intake between children who were obese and children who weren't. But as Butte notes, ''We know they have to be eating more,'' and everyone tends to underestimate how many calories they eat. In order to assess how individuals actually metabolize what they consume, Butte is also gathering data in a ''room calorimeter,'' an extreme measure that involves a sealed chamber equipped with a bed, toilet, sink, desk, TV, CD player and telephone, where children spend up to 24 hours. Here, caloric intake, as well as how much oxygen a child breathes and how much carbon dioxide she exhales, can be precisely recorded. Outside factors are not helping, either. Throughout America, high-calorie fast food is cheaper than food that's good for you. Starr County has its share of franchises, including McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box and Burger King. What's more, in the Rio Grande Valley, as elsewhere, children are not getting enough exercise, a fact linked by some to the general indifference to exercise along with the misapprehension of risk: the risk of, say, letting your kid run around the neighborhood versus the risk of encouraging a sedentary life by keeping her home. ''If you look at the probability of something that's in the headlines -- that your kid is abducted -- the probability of that happening to your child is very low, though certainly it's a terrible thing,'' said Deanna Hoelscher, director of the Human Nutrition Center at the University of Texas's School of Public Health at Houston. ''But if it happens, everybody hears about it, so the perception is that the risk is very high. However, the probability of your kid being overweight right now is very high, because a lot of kids are overweight. So you have to balance things out. Though of course, providing safe places for children to play would alleviate parents' fears.'' While to date few have studied them, the sociological underpinnings of childhood obesity in Hispanic communities seem to operate on three levels: inside Hispanic -- and American -- culture as a whole, inside specific communities like Starr County and inside families. Visio's most rewarding work has been inside individual families; as she puts it, ''I've got to get to that home, that mom, that family, that grandmother. Get inside that child's world. The child doesn't have the money to buy groceries.'' One afternoon she met with Cristen Gonzalez, who was 9 years old, and Cristen's mother, Gracie, a schoolteacher in Rio Grande City, to discuss the situation at home. Two months before, Christen started Visio's program. At that time, Cristen, the oldest of three children, was well into the overweight range. Cristen has a small, sweet voice, is on the elementary-school drill team and wants to rescue animals when she grows up. She also wants to be a good girl, and in the context of Visio's program, with its focus on healthful food and weekly nutrition and exercise classes, her mother was concerned. ''She's been obsessing about the program,'' whispered Gracie, who was also hoping to lose weight. Cristen drew quietly at a folding table. ''This week especially, she's been so self-conscious. I can't have it anymore.'' Guilt is a major problem in dealing with childhood obesity -- the guilt parents feel in denying their children food or inadvertently making them self-conscious about their weight, the guilt children try to instill in their parents in order to get what they want. Gracie, by all rights, has a lot to feel proud about. The Gonzalez family is strong, loving, disciplined and intact. Gracie and her husband both have good jobs in the school district; they don't eat much fast food, going out for only one meal a week, lunch after church on Sunday; and they are still married -- and that puts them way ahead of most families in the county, where jobs and structured families are scarce. Once, a few years ago, when a friend of Cristen's came to sleep over, the little girl saw Gracie in the kitchen and begged her to make her spaghetti; people rarely cooked in her house. The girl also found it exotic that Cristen had a bedtime; she was used to falling asleep around midnight from sheer exhaustion. Still, life for the Gonzalezes was not so easy. Three kids plus two working parents did not leave Gracie time each week to plan menus and shop carefully for groceries, which Visio explained she should do. So harried was Gracie that she sometimes caught up on paperwork while her children ate dinner. This meant, to Visio's eyes at least, that Cristen was more or less having to tackle her weight problem alone. Visio asked Gracie what her past week was like. ''Crazy,'' she replied. ''So crazy. My husband had to take care of his parents, and my little Anthony'' -- who is 5 -- ''lost his two front teeth running into his best friend's head. I walked out of a staff meeting to get here. I've barely had time to eat.'' Visio pressed her, ''Have you been sitting down for meals together at night?'' The Journal of Adolescent Health has reported that families that eat together consume healthier food. Gracie smiled and shook her head. ''Haven't had time.'' ''Do you think this weekend you can make menus again, go shopping?'' ''Next week.'' ''Cristen needs you -- you just told me, she's obsessing on the program.'' ''Don't make me feel worse,'' Gracie said. ''I already feel bad enough.'' Cristen looked up from her drawing again. ''Twenty minutes, just 20 minutes,'' Visio said. ''Everyone has 20 minutes. I'm sorry to tell you this, Gracie, but if you're not sitting down to meals together and showing her you eat just like you're telling her to, you're putting it all on her.'' Across town at the John and Olive Hinojosa Elementary School, on an unpaved road beside one of the colonias, 50 second and third graders in red-and-white uniforms spent phys-ed class having a dance party under a big gazebo. It's rare to see children in Rio Grande City being so active outside. The average high temperature is above 87 degrees for nine months of the year, and even in the cooler months, the north wind blows fiercely across the Rio Grande plain. Despite the day's heat, the dance party was a grand success, the kids jumping and shaking and feeling confident and comfortable. But paradoxically, that confidence can create its own problems. Sometimes, explained Olga Smedley, the principal, that self-certainty gives the children the upper hand in dealings with their parents. Starr County has three bridges to Mexico, and countless places for unofficial crossings. Some women who live in the area arrived from Mexico pregnant in order to have American-born children. As a result, many parents are trying to raise children in a country where they aren't supposed to be. ''A lot of these parents give in to their kids too much,'' said Smedley, a pretty and trim mother of three who grew up in the Rio Grande City area and does her best to resist her chubby 6-year-old's relentless requests for shrimp scampi. The upended power dynamics can lead parents to cede authority to children and lead children to bully their parents. ''These children threaten their parents,'' Smedley said. ''They say: 'If you spank me, or if you do this, I'm going to call child protective services. I'm going to call the police.' '' Smedley explained that the kids are just being kids, but the parents, perhaps feeling vulnerable, capitulate. ''Who's in control?'' Smedley asked, her eyes widening and her frustration apparent. ''I told the parents -- it's because you're allowing it.'' The odd power dynamic affects food choices as well. After Visio trimmed back the fat and sugar from the school lunch and breakfast menus -- no more breakfasts of sugar-coated cereals and a bag of cookies; in fact, cookies are no longer served, and cereals are low in sugar -- many teachers were pleased. But the children, not surprisingly, were not happy, a feeling they expressed by staging lunchroom protests and hanging signs outside some cafeterias that read ''No more diet'' and ''We want to eat cool stuff -- pizza, nachos, burritos, cheese fries.'' Visio expected as much from the kids, but what caught her short was how much the children's hounding got to their parents, and how often those parents caved to their children's shortsighted, unhealthful wishes. ''We have one morbidly obese girl, and since we changed the menus, her mother has been stuffing her backpack with three bags of chips and three candy bars, every day,'' Visio said. ''This is in addition to a full breakfast and lunch. Some of these parents are just afraid to say no. They love their children, but their children have them convinced that if they eat a healthy diet, they will starve.'' The issues affecting the Hispanic child-obesity epidemic have been the hardest to talk about, and Roel Gonzalez, the school superintendent, has appointed himself the man for the job. ''I know we always hear sad stories about different groups of people, but this is one group that's very sad,'' Gonzalez said over breakfast one morning. Many of the concerns he described are true of American culture as a whole and crystallized in Starr County. ''The attitude here is hoard as much as you can right now, because there might not be tomorrow.'' Some health care researchers who are studying obesity and diabetes among Hispanics talk about an undercurrent called fatalismo -- the belief that there's little you can do to alter your own destiny, so why not live for today? ''But we have to change,'' Gonzalez said. ''We don't have more time. This is something we need to get on now, but we're going to go slowly. Like my dad says, if you're in a hurry, go slow, and I'm in an awful hurry.'' Gonzalez grew up in Starr County, left for a time to work in upstate New York and Washington and now every morning puts on a suit and heads to Che's, the restaurant downstairs in Rio Grande City's one elegant old border hotel, where we met one day. Gonzalez sees himself as the children's advocate in the ''Lean on Me'' tradition, the stalwart authority figure, the local boy made good. ''The kids are not negotiable,'' he said in his husky, urgent voice, stopping often to greet every customer who walked in by name. ''You can have my parking space, my office, I don't care, but I will never negotiate the kids. Those children's lives are my responsibility. Not only academically -- their lives physically are in my hands.'' Gonzalez has decided that the children deserve not only positive change -- when Visio approached Gonzalez about revising the breakfast and lunch menus for the kids in her diabetes program, he instructed her to alter menus for the entire district -- but also to hear adults speak the truth about the particular problems in their community. In the past year, he set up salad bars for all the teachers (''the teachers have to model it, because kids idolize their teachers, and if they don't, they're bad teachers''). He also hired Rey Ramirez, a local Hispanic athlete -- a Texas track and field champion -- to try to get his town physically active again. As a farmhand, Gonzalez's father never had to seek out exercise, but Gonzalez himself, like a lot of his neighbors, is packing a few extra pounds. He understands what the children are up against. ''Out here it's 110 degrees at 6 in the afternoon, and not very many people want to go outside and play. Myself, I get up every morning and walk. I get up at 4:45 a.m. or 5, and it's hard. Some mornings, I just want to stay in bed. If it's so hard for me, I can only imagine what it's like for a child.'' Gonzalez also talked about how attitudes toward self-reliance have changed significantly in the course of a single generation. He told a story I heard several times from people over 40 in Rio Grande City. ''When I went to school they gave you colored coupons,'' he said. ''The blue one meant you paid for your lunch. The white one was a reduced price. The pink one was free, and you didn't want to be seen with the pink one. People would tear you apart.'' Now government assistance is a major part of the fabric of society. In addition to free meals for their children in school, many adults in Starr County receive food stamps, health care and utility and housing subsidies. Much of this is beneficial, of course, but Gonzalez also explained that it has contributed to eroding the old norms. A while back, for instance, Gonzalez caught a girl smoking marijuana. ''I told her that's not what I would call normal behavior for a girl of 12, and she said, 'It's normal in my house.' It's normal in my house. We've got to change what's normal.'' The parents in Gonzalez's community are as loving as you'll find anywhere, but, as Gonzalez explained, there is an inclination to overempathize or overcompensate with their children. This is happening across cultures and classes throughout the country. Children are indulged and are obese everywhere, but the conditions in Starr County aggravate the problem. His term to describe this is ''pobrecito syndrome,'' an affliction of parents and other adults, passed down to youngsters, part fatalismo and part a communal throwing up of the hands. Pobrecito means ''poor little thing,'' and ''the pobrecito syndrome,'' Gonzalez said, occurs when parents ''feel sorry for their child and they're doing the best they can but -- they're just so sorry and they really do nothing. All they do without intending to is perpetuate the problem, and so it continues.'' Or to put it another way, some parents can have bad habits -- regarding food, drugs, exercise, financial responsibility -- that they want to change, or say they want to change, but can't. ''Basically, it's an addiction. We just can't get the parents off the TV, and we can't get them to stop eating fast food. We can't get them to do anything. And the kids aren't going to get off the TV if the parents don't get off the TV. It's going to be a long, hard battle, because it's very hard to reach the child if the parent is entrenched.'' Several years ago, Gonzalez and his wife started a Subway franchise in Rio Grande City in order to provide a quick, affordable option to greasy fast food. It was one small step -- like his current efforts to secure financing to build an indoor pool and nice walking paths in town -- but Gonzalez realizes the problems run much deeper. ''We have drugs everywhere,'' he said. ''The cemeteries are full of people who OD'ed. We have kids coming to school who've seen a father or a brother shot, kids who are dealing with a parent in prison.'' Still, when Gonzalez says he's been up all night thinking about a kindergartner who weighs 90 pounds -- the average for an American kindergartner is about half that -- it's easy to believe him. ''We have to catch them between kindergarten and second grade, because after that it gets real hard,'' he told me. ''The ones that are slightly obese, what we call 'chubbies,' at that stage they can change. But once they get too big, it's next to impossible.'' With so many children and parents overweight or obese, there's little stigma attached to being fat. Teasing about extra heft or gentle nudging to eat more healthfully doesn't begin until the problem is quite dire. ''They think, I look good. They don't already see that they're in the danger zone.'' Gonzalez slipped his suit jacket back on to rush off to the high school for the day. ''These kids mean the world to me. We've got to make the first move. If we ask the kids to make the first move, we're going to lose the battle.'' In her pink terry tank top and shorts, Cristen stopped by the Rio Grande health center to be weighed and measured by Visio's team before heading to a pool party for the drill team. By 9 a.m., the morning was scorchingly hot already, and in line at the health center in front of Cristen stood a boy in a dark blue T-shirt and dark blue pants named Alfredo. Daniel Hale, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, and one of the nation's leading experts on childhood diabetes, looked at the blood pressure cuff and said to Alfredo, ''I bet we need a little bit bigger one for you.'' Then he said to the boy, ''So, what have you been doing?'' Alfredo said, ''The kids all went to the pool on Friday, but I didn't want to go, so I just stayed home.'' Hale measured him at 4 feet 11 inches, then he put him on the body-composition analyzer scale, where Alfredo registered 171 pounds and 46 percent body fat. ''The problem is,'' Hale said after the boy left, ''most of the potential solutions rest either on very large changes in public policy or very small changes that individuals and families must make in the context of their own home. There's very little we in the public-health community can do. We don't have very much control over what children eat, we don't have much control over safety, which affects where children play, and we're not in people's homes, where kids are taking part in the major sedentary behavior, known as television watching. And here in South Texas, where you can get an Extreme Gulp, which is 52 ounces of soda, and a bag of chips for a dollar, and there aren't many outlets for physical activity, the kids are at great risk. The biggest problem is not that that kid doesn't feel comfortable swimming. The biggest problem is that the long-term consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle begin to accumulate 15 to 20 years after those lifestyles are initiated. When these kids are in their 20's, the consequences are really going to come home to roost.'' When it came to Cristen's turn, she weighed in at 10 pounds less than two months before, when she started the program. Her mother, Gracie, two younger lean children in tow, said proudly: ''It wasn't until she started school that you couldn't see her neck. Now you can see more of her neck.'' Cristen smiled and stood up for herself. ''I have to say, I have a neck, and it's right here.'' Elizabeth Weil is an author of ''Crib Notes: A Random Reference for the Modern Parent,'' published by Chronicle Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02OBESITY.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:26:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:26:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Korean Missionaries Carrying Word to Hard-to-Sway Places Message-ID: Korean Missionaries Carrying Word to Hard-to-Sway Places NYT November 1, 2004 By NORIMITSU ONISHI [This came shortly after I abandoned reality. I am not sure of its relevance to reality, actually. I have over a hundred articles still backlogged. They will come five a day for a few more days and go to everyone on my lists. On the 10th, I'll send them only selected lists and step them up to ten a day. If you want to get everything, let me know and I'll put you on my master list. Sometimes, even still, I'll send articles of general interest, like things about computer problems, to all my lists.] AMMAN, Jordan - A South Korean missionary here speaks of introducing Jesus in a "low voice and with wisdom" to Muslims, the most difficult group to convert. In Baghdad, South Koreans plan to open a seminary even after Iraqi churches have been bombed in two recent coordinated attacks. In Beijing, they defy the Chinese government to smuggle North Koreans to Seoul while turning them into Christians. South Korea has rapidly become the world's second largest source of Christian missionaries, only a couple of decades after it started deploying them. With more than 12,000 abroad, it is second only to the United States and ahead of Britain. The Koreans have joined their Western counterparts in more than 160 countries, from the Middle East to Africa, from Central to East Asia. Imbued with the fervor of the born again, they have become known for aggressively going to - and sometimes being expelled from - the hardest-to-evangelize corners of the world. Their actions are at odds with the foreign policy of South Korea's government, which is trying to rein them in here and elsewhere. It is the first time that large numbers of Christian missionaries have been deployed by a non-Western nation, one whose roots are Confucian and Buddhist, and whose population remains two-thirds non-Christian. Unlike Western missionaries, whose work dovetailed with the spread of colonialism, South Koreans come from a country with little history of sending people abroad until recently. They proselytize, not in their own language, but in the local one or English. "There is a saying that when Koreans now arrive in a new place, they establish a church; the Chinese establish a restaurant; the Japanese, a factory," said a South Korean missionary in his 40's, who has worked here for several years and, like many others, asked not to be identified because of the dangers of proselytizing in Muslim countries. In Iraq, eight South Korean missionaries were briefly kidnapped in April. Then, in June, Kim Sun Il, a 33-year-old man who had planned to do missionary work, was taken hostage and beheaded. In July, nearly 460 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea, thanks to a smuggling network set up by missionaries in China. In 1979, only 93 South Koreans were serving as missionaries, according to the Korea Research Institute for Missions. Compared with South Korea's 12,000, there are about 46,000 American and 6,000 British missionaries, according to missionary organizations in South Korea and the West. Roman Catholicism first came to the Korean Peninsula in the late 18th century, followed a century later by Protestant missionaries from the United States. Christianity failed to set firm roots in Japan and China, where 19th-century missionaries were seen as agents of Western imperialism. But it spread quickly on the Korean Peninsula, where American missionaries helped Korean nationalists fight against Japanese colonial rulers and informed the outside world of the brutalities of Japanese colonialism. It was only in the last two decades, however, with the growth of the South Korean economy and its newly democratic government's decision to allow its citizens to travel freely overseas, that South Korean Christianity took on a missionary gloss. Today, an equal number of missionaries are born again or members of Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptists denominations, said Steve S. C. Moon, executive director of the Korea Research Institute for Missions. These missionaries, like their Western counterparts, tend to focus on activities that are evangelical, educational and medical, and their beliefs are far more traditional than those of newer sects like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the Korean-rooted movement. A typical case is the Presbyterian Onnuri Church, founded 19 years ago with the main purpose of training missionaries. It now has 500 in 53 countries, though it focuses on China, Indonesia and India, said Kim Joong Won, director of its missionary program. Until June, Onnuri had a church in Baghdad where Kim Sun Il, who was beheaded, had gone to worship. "He is a martyr to God's glory," said Mr. Moon of the research institute. "Korean missionaries are eager to do God's work and glorify God. They want to die for God." Because religious visas are difficult to obtain in the Middle East, many come on student visas or set up computer or other businesses, and evangelize discreetly. One Korean who has worked here several years and spoke of evangelizing in a "low voice and with wisdom," said that over intimate meals with three or four Muslims he would let the conversation drift to Jesus. So delicate is his work that he never mentions words like "missionary" or "evangelize." Muslims who have converted to Christianity are never identified as such - a necessary precaution in a society where some families engage in so-called honor killings of relatives who have left Islam. Many missionaries also focus on bringing Arab Catholics or Chaldeans into the evangelical fold. "There are so many ways to do our work," said the missionary in his 40's, who works in a local church in Amman and delivers English sermons that are translated into Arabic. "Just as American missionaries did in Korea by building schools and hospitals, there are many ways here," he said. "One important group is Iraqi refugees. They come here. They are tired physically and spiritually. They are so lonely. We help them. They realize they are being helped by Christians. Then they ask about Jesus." About 30 missionary families have settled here in Amman. Others wait to return to Iraq, which they left in June under intense pressure from the South Korean government. John Jung has been working with an Iraqi pastor, Estawri Haritounian, 40, to open a seminary at the National Protestant Evangelical Church in Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein's regime allowed Christians to gather in private houses, so it was difficult, though possible, for us to evangelize," said Mr. Jung, who has been traveling in and out of Iraq for several years. "But now it has become even more difficult for Christians in Iraq. Christians are afraid of Muslims for the first time. We are frustrated we can't be in Iraq at this important time. But as soon as the security allows, we will go back to Baghdad." In Baghdad, Mr. Haritounian explained recently that the church had been founded half a century ago with the help of British missionaries. American missionaries replaced them later and were in turn succeeded by South Koreans. "We dreamed this dream, Pastor John and I, to start a seminary in Baghdad," said Mr. Haritounian, showing eight completed, though empty, classrooms. Mr. Jung, in Amman, said they hoped to start classes as soon as the security improved in Baghdad. "We'll start with only 15 students, but we hope to grow in the future," he said. Many in Amman said South Koreans had an advantage over others, especially now that the war in Iraq has aggravated anti-American feelings in the Middle East. "People expect missionaries to be from America or Europe, so Koreans can do their work quietly," Mr. Haritounian said. "Because of the bad image of Americans now, it will be more difficult for American missionaries to work here." Dennis Merdian, 50, an American missionary, said that in one difficult project he and a South Korean counterpart agreed immediately that it would be better for the South Korean to take the lead. "He wasn't carrying the American government with him," Mr. Merdian said. But because of their short history of living overseas, some South Koreans expect that other cultures will behave the same way their own does and that Christianity will spread abroad as quickly as it did in South Korea, said Mr. Moon of the Korea Research Institute for Missions. "Western missionaries tend to carry a sense of guilt because of their imperialist past," he said. "But Koreans don't have that historical baggage, and they are not inhibited in reaching out to people with the Gospel. So in their missionary work, they tend not to consult the local people, but make decisions in one direction." Shadi Samir, 28, a Jordanian pastor who has worked with South Koreans and recently visited Seoul, said he had seen inexperienced missionaries commit cultural blunders. "They come here full of energy and go out on the streets where they approach women and tell them Jesus loves them," Mr. Samir said. "By making such mistakes, they create problems not only for themselves and other Koreans, but also for us." Kim Dong Moon, a missionary who works in the Middle East and also writes about the missionary movement, said some South Korean missionaries had been deported from the Middle East and ended up on blacklists. "There are some pushy Korean missionaries whose approach is: 'Come to the Kingdom of God now! Or, go to hell,' " Mr. Kim said recently in Seoul. In China, South Koreans concentrate on converting the Chinese, as well as the ethnic North Koreans living in northeastern China. After they are smuggled out of China to South Korea, though, only about a third of the North Koreans continue practicing Christianity, missionaries said. Other South Koreans train North Korean Christians to return to the North to spread the Gospel. "North Korea, which is occupied by the devil Kim Jong Il, is the biggest target of our missionary work," said Kim Sang Chul, president of the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, a Christian organization. The missionary here in Amman in his 40's said that, in his previous posting in the Philippines, he was awed when he saw American missionaries fly to remote islands and, wherever they spotted signs of life in the jungle below, drop food packets as the first contact with what missionaries call "unreached people." "So even here, it is very difficult, but not impossible," he said. "We are planting one church at a time." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/international/asia/01missionaries.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 00:29:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Geoffrey Miller: Cultural production and political ideology as courtship displays Message-ID: Cultural production and political ideology as courtship displays http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/political_peacocks.htm [He's the author of The Mating Mind, a highly original book arguing how sexual selection made men AND women human. This article came out before he finished the book. This article should interest transhumanists, too, as they contemplate post-humans. They should come in at least two sexes!] Political peacocks by Geoffrey F. Miller published as: Miller, G. F. (1996). Political peacocks. Demos Quarterly, 10 (Special issue on evolutionary psychology), pp. 9-11. The puzzle Suddenly, in the spring of 1986 in New York, hundreds of Columbia University students took over the campus adminstration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa. As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I was puzzled by the spontaneity, ardour, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country six thousand miles away? The campus conservative newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the protest as an annual springtime mating ritual, with Dionysian revels punctuated by political sloganeering about this year's arbitrary cause. At the time, I thought the cartoon tasteless and patronizing. Now, I wonder if it contained a grain of truth. Although the protests achieved their political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and the protest ended just in time to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years. The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock's tail or the nightingale's song, seems dangerous. It risks trivializing all of political discourse, just as the conservative cartoon lampooned the Columbia anti-apartheid protests. The best way to avoid this pitfall is not to ignore the sexual undertones to human political behavior, but to analyze them seriously and respectfully using the strongest and most relevant theory we have from evolutionary biology: Darwin's theory of sexual selection through mate choice. The history Most people think of Darwinian evolution as a blind, haphazard, unguided process in which physical environments impose capricious selection pressures on species, which must adapt or die. True, for natural selection itself. But Darwin himself seems to have become rather bored with natural selection by the inanimate environment after he published The Origin of Species in 1859. He turned to much more interesting question of how animal and human minds can shape evolution. In his 1862 book On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilized by insects he outlined how the perceptual and behavioral capacities of pollinators shape the evolution of flower color and form. In his massive two-volume work of 1868, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, he detailed how human needs and tastes have shaped the evolution of useful and ornamental features in domesticates. Further works on animal emotions in 1872 and the behavior of climbing plants in 1875 continued the trend towards an evolutionary psychology. Most provocatively, Darwin combined the frisson of sex with the spookiness of mind and the enigma of human evolution in his two-volume masterpiece of 1871, The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex. Darwin observed that many animals, especially females, are rather picky about their sexual partners. But why would it ever pay to reject a suitor? Being choosy requires time, energy, and intelligence - costs that can impair survival. The basic rationale for mate choice is that random mating is stupid mating. It pays to be choosy because in a sexually reproducing species, the genetic quality of your mate will determine half the genetic quality of your offspring. Ugly, unhealthy mates usually lead to ugly, unhealthy offspring. By forming a joint genetic venture with an attractive, high-quality mate, one's genes are much more likely to be passed on. Mate choice is simply the best eugenics and genetic screening that female animals are capable of carrying out under field conditions, with no equipment other than their senses and their brains. Often, sexual selection through mate choice can lead to spectacular results: the bowerbird's elaborate nest, the riflebird's riveting dance, the nightingale's haunting song, and the peacock's iridescent tail, for example. Such features are complex adaptations that evolved through mate choice, to function both as advertisements of the male's health and as aesthetic displays that excite female senses. One can recognize these courtship displays by certain biological criteria: they are expensive to produce and hard to maintain, they have survival costs but reproductive benefits, they are loud, bright, rhythmic, complex, and creative to stimulate the senses, they occur more often after reproductive maturity, more often during the breeding season, more often in males than in females, and more often when potential mates are present than absent. Also, they tend to evolve according to unpredictable fashion cycles that change the detailed structure and content of the displays while maintaining their complexity, extremity, and cost. By these criteria, most human behaviors that we call cultural, ideological, and political would count as courtship displays. Victorian skeptics objected to Darwin's theory of sexual selection by pointing out that in contemporary European society, women tended to display more physical ornamentation than men, contrary to the men-display-more hypothesis. This is true only if courtship display is artificially restricted to physical artefacts worn on the body. Whereas Victorian women ornamented themselves with mere jewelry and clothing, men ornamented themselves with the books they wrote, pictures they painted, symphonies they composed, country estates they bought, honors they won, and vast political and economic empires they built. Although Darwin presented overwhelming evidence for his ingenious sexual selection theory, it fell into disrepute for over a century. Even Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, preferred to view male ornaments as outlets for a surplus of male energy, rather than as adaptations evolved through female choice. Even now, we hear echoes of Wallace's fallacious surplus-of-energy argument in most psychological and anthropological theories about the "self-expressive" functions of human art, music, language, and culture. The Modern Synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinism in the 1930s continued to reject female choice, assuming that sexual ornaments simply intimidate other males or keep animals from mating with the wrong species. Only in the 1980s, with a confluence of support from mathematical models, computer simulations, and experiments in animal and human mate choice, has Darwin's sexual selection theory been re-established as a major part of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, almost everything written about the evolutionary origins of the human mind, language, culture, ideology, and politics, has ignored the power of sexual selection through mate choice as a force that creates exactly these sorts of elaborate display behaviors. The hypothesis Humans are ideological animals. We show strong motivations and incredible capacities to learn, create, recombine, and disseminate ideas. Despite the evidence that these idea-processing systems are complex biological adaptations that must have evolved through Darwinian selection, even the most ardent modern Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richards Dawkins, and Dan Dennett tend to treat culture as an evolutionary arena separate from biology. One reason for this failure of nerve is that it is so difficult to think of any form of natural selection that would favor such extreme, costly, and obsessive ideological behavior. Until the last 40,000 years of human evolution, the pace of technological and social change was so slow that it's hard to believe there was much of a survival payoff to becoming such an ideological animal. My hypothesis, developed in a long Ph.D. dissertation, several recent papers, and a forthcoming book, is that the payoffs to ideological behavior were largely reproductive. The heritable mental capacities that underpin human language, culture, music, art, and myth-making evolved through sexual selection operating on both men and women, through mutual mate choice. Whatever technological benefits those capacities happen to have produced in recent centuries are unanticipated side-effects of adaptations originally designed for courtship. Language, of course, is the key to ideological display. Whereas songbirds can only toy with protean combinations of pitch, rhythm, and timbre, language gives humans the closest thing to telepathy in nature: the ability to transmit complex ideas from one head to another, through the tricks of syntax and semantics. Language opens a window into other minds, expanding the arena of courtship display from the physical to the conceptual. This has enormous implications for the way that sexual selection worked during the last few hundred thousand years of human evolution. As human courtship relied more heavily on language, mate choice focused more on the ideas that language expresses. The selection pressures that shaped the evolution of the human mind came increasingly not from the environment testing whether one's hunting skills were sufficient for survival, but from other minds testing whether one's ideas were interesting enough to provoke some sexual attraction. Every ancestor of every human living today was successful in attracting someone to mate with them. Conversely, the millions of hominids and early humans who were too dull and uninspiring to become our ancestors carried genes for brains that were not as ideologically expressive as ours. A wonderful effect of this runaway sexual selection was that brain size in our lineage has tripled over the last two million years, giving us biologically unprecedented capacities for creative thought, astonishing expressiveness, and intricate culture. A more problematic effect is that our ideological capacities were under selection to be novel, interesting, and entertaining to other idea-infested minds, not to accurately represent the external world or their own transient and tangential place in it. This general argument applies to many domains of human behaviour and culture, but for the remainder of the paper, I will focus on political ideology. The predictions and implications The vast majority of people in modern societies have almost no political power, yet have strong political convictions that they broadcast insistently, frequently, and loudly when social conditions are right. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who see clear time and energy costs to ideological behavior, but little political benefit to the individual. My point is that the individual benefits of expressing political ideology are usually not political at all, but social and sexual. As such, political ideology is under strong social and sexual constraints that make little sense to political theorists and policy experts. This simple idea may solve a number of old puzzles in political psychology. Why do hundreds of questionnaires show that men more conservative, more authoritarian, more rights-oriented, and less empathy-oriented than women? Why do people become more conservative as the move from young adulthood to middle age? Why do more men than women run for political office? Why are most ideological revolutions initiated by young single men? None of these phenomena make sense if political ideology is a rational reflection of political self-interest. In political, economic, and psychological terms, everyone has equally strong self-interests, so everyone should produce equal amounts of ideological behavior, if that behavior functions to advance political self-interest. However, we know from sexual selection theory that not everyone has equally strong reproductive interests. Males have much more to gain from each act of intercourse than females, because, by definition, they invest less in each gamete. Young males should be especially risk-seeking in their reproductive behavior, because they have the most to win and the least to lose from risky courtship behavior (such as becoming a political revolutionary). These predictions are obvious to any sexual selection theorist. Less obvious are the ways in which political ideology is used to advertise different aspects of one's personality across the lifespan. In unpublished studies I ran at Stanford University with Felicia Pratto, we found that university students tend to treat each others' political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is simply read off as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality who will excel at protecting and provisioning his or her mate. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality who will excel at child care and relationship-building. Given the well-documented, cross-culturally universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men, the expression of more liberal ideologies by women and more conservative ideologies by men is not surprising. Men use political conservatism to (unconsciously) advertise their likely social and economic dominance; women use political liberalism to advertise their nurturing abilities. The shift from liberal youth to conservative middle age reflects a mating-relevant increase in social dominance and earnings power, not just a rational shift in one's self-interest. More subtley, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests. This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before. The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid. This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes. What can policy analysts do, if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal the proponent's personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas first as big-brained, idea-infested, hypersexual primates, and only secondly as concerned citizens in a modern polity. This view will not surprise political pollsters, spin doctors, and speech writers, who make their daily living by exploiting our lust for ideology, but it may surprise social scientists who take a more rationalistic view of human nature. Fortunately, sexual selection was not the only force to shape our minds. Other forms of social selection such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and even group selection seem to have favoured some instincts for political rationality and consensual egalitarianism. Without the sexual selection, we would never have become such colourful ideological animals. But without the other forms of social selection, we would have little hope of bringing our sexily protean ideologies into congruence with reality. Further Readings Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual selection. Princeton U. Press. Betzig, L. (1986). Despotism and differential reproduction: A Darwinian view of history. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine. Buss, D. M. (1994). The evolution of desire: Human mating strategies. New York: Basic Books. Cronin, H. (1991). The ant and the peacock: Altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today. Cambridge U. Press. Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2 vols.). London: John Murray. Fisher, H. (1992). Anatomy of love: The natural history of monogamy, adultery, and divorce. New York: Simon & Schuster. Miller, G. F. (1993). Evolution of the human brain through runaway sexual selection: The mind as a protean courtship device. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University Psychology Department. (Available through UMI Microfilms; Book in preparation for MIT Press/Bradford Books). Miller, G. F. (in press). Sexual selection in human evolution: Review and prospects. For C. Crawford & D. Krebs (Eds.), Evolution and Human Behavior: Ideas, Issues, and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum. Miller, G. F., & Todd, P. M. (1995). The role of mate choice in biocomputation: Sexual selection as a process of search, optimization, and diversification. In W. Banzaf & F. Eeckman (Eds.), Evolution and biocomputation: Computational models of evolution. Lecture notes in computer science 899. (pp. 169-204). Springer-Verlag. Pomiankowski, A., & Moller, A. (1995). A resolution of the lek paradox. Proc. R. Soc. London B, 260(1357), 21-29. Ridley, M. (1993). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. New York: Viking. Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal: Evolutionary psychology and everyday life. New York: Pantheon Books. From HowlBloom at aol.com Tue Jan 4 07:11:30 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 02:11:30 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=9CNot_Pooch=2C_but_Rudolf_was_Man?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZcyBiZXN0IEZyaWVuZCHigJ0=?= Message-ID: <66.4dc9a0b4.2f0b9ba2@aol.com> >From the pen of Val Geist. In my opinion, this is bloody brilliant: ?Not Pooch, but Rudolf was Man?s best Friend!? Reindeer were our salvation as they allowed us to speed towards complex cultures and obliterate our powerful rival, Neanderthal man. Without Reindeer, it is not unlikely that we would be still in a stone-age culture, and Neanderthal would be probably alive and well, and excluding us from much of Eurasia. In the above paper I explain step by step how we managed to gain on Neanderthal and ultimately starve him out. And reindeer were central to that! The paper explains why. Why start with that? It?s as good as any point, because human evolution is tied to it and we can radiate wherever we care to look. In a (big!) nutshell: With the first glacial maximum of the last glaciation (Wuerm/ Wisconsinian) at about 60,000 BP, Neanderthal shrank back from the severely aired Mediterranean basin towards the rich European periglacial zones, allowing desert-adapted Cro-Magnids to escape out of Africa and move east to at least Australia. Because ocean levels were then at last 100 m lower we know nothing archeologically about this break out. However, we have reason to assume that boat cultures developed along the ocean shores. At about 40,000 BP, during an interstadial, Cro-Magnids thrust north and split, one branch going west along the glacial front of the Scandinavian ice sheath. The other branch heads east towards central Asia. Cro-Magnon occupies a wedge of land just south of the Scandinavian ice sheath an just north of Neanderthal geographic distribution which clings close to mountains and montane glaciers. This situation continues for some five to six thousand years, till Neanderthal goes extinct. We and they were thus close together for thousands of years, and the demise of Neanderthal man was slow. Only then did we occupy all of Europe. There is no evidence for warfare between us and them. How was prolonged co-existence possible? Why no interbreeding? What killed off Neanderthal? Examining the Cro-magnids we note that some 95 % of the bones recovered from their sites are reindeer bones; other species such as mammoth, wooly rhino, giant deer, are rare in Upper Paleolithic deposits, but common in Neanderthal sites. Cro-magnids, but not Neanderthal man, distinguish themselves as artists. However, the cave artists are fascinated not by reindeer, on which they depend for food, but with dangerous beasts. To make along story short: the evidence suggests that the painters were young men. They were very courageous young men for it takes real guts to crawl deep into the earth with the equipment they had and then paint a scene. Now, Dale Guthrie, who has written a book on this subject, argues that the paintings reflect the wishes of young men to give an excellent account of their prowess ? by confronting the largest an most dangerous of the fauna. In short: cave art is bravado by young men. Though they ate reindeer, they dreamt mammoth etc.! Reindeer were food; mammoths were sport! The Cro-magnids grew large, athletic bodies and huge brains! They apparently killed reindeer in excess, then stored the products. The trick was to catch the reindeer crossing in a canyon at an acceptable place where they can be killed in excess of need with hand-thrown attl- attls. To do so regularly, demanded that the hunters had to predict accurately when the reindeer crossed at what place. Reindeer migrations are tied to chronologic time and can only be predicted by someone who could keep track of annual chronologic time, that is, by someone who had a calendar. Mashack postulated 1972 that the ?baton de commandement? made of the 2nd antler tine of reindeer bulls was a lunar calendar. Since reindeer cross rivers at predictable places, a calendar allowed one to anticipate and plan for reindeer migrations. Therefore reindeer could be exploited to the high level observable. With reindeer meat and products preserved, Cro magids were free to indulge in other activities for times between reindeer fall and spring migrations. Hunting for sport large and dangerous creatures was one option which, besides ?glory?, also supplied fresh meat and welcome relief from dried, smoked and fermented reindeer. Neanderthal was dependent not on reindeer, which he killed occasionally, but on large-bodied megafauna from the mammoth steppe ? mammoth, woolly rhino, horses, bison, giant deer. He was restricted to the over-wintering areas of these giants close to large glaciers which, harboring cold pockets, prevented the icing over of ranges and thus provided predictable winter habitat for the food of Neanderthal. With the arrival of Cro- Magnon these large creatures begin to decline. They had not done so when only Neanderthal occupied Europe. Therefore, the most likely cause of Neanderthal?s - slow ? extinction, was the demise of his favorite megafaunal prey. Without migratory reindeer, and our ability to accurately predict the timing of their migrations and kill in excess, we could not have persisted, let alone developed superlative athletic bodies and a culture that lasted some 25,000 years. >From Neanderthal?s perspective, reindeer were a frustrating beast which appeared in herds then vanished. However ? and this is new ? there is another angle: reindeer were not an appropriate food for Neanderthal! They were distinctly inferior as food to mammoth, rhino and horses! This why: Neanderthal was a super-athlete, as he had to be practicing the specialized type of hunting he did. For a human to be a super athlete, especially one with so large a brain as Neanderthal possessed, requires a very large supply of Essential Fatty Acids (EFA?s), which are linnoleic acid (Omega-6) and alpha-linnoleic acid (Omega-3). Unfortunately, these highly reactive fatty acids are degraded in the rumen of ruminants, so that the fat of ruminants (reindeer are ruminants) has relatively less of the essential fatty acids. However, these fatty acids are quite abundant in the fat of what we call mono-gastrics, that is, in herbivores that first digest their food via a true stomach before it is fermented in the hind gut and ceacum. Consequently, the soft fats of mammoth, rhino, horses, onagers, but also of bears and wild pigs was far preferable to Neanderthal than the hard and nutritionally inferior fats of reindeer and bison. This means that Neanderthal, as a specialized carnivore, to fulfill its physiological needs, must have chosen to hunt creatures other than reindeer, and had no particular reason to hunt reindeer, except as an occasional change in diet. Cro-Magnon, the descendant of coastal people had acquaintance with fish diets. Fatty fish have a large abundance of Essential Fatty Acids, especially the rare Omega-3 variety. Cro-Magnon, early on, catches migratory salmon, whose appearance in rivers can also be predicted by the use of a calendar. Therefore, any nutritional deficit in reindeer fat could be readily made up by eating some dried and smoked salmon. Also, all reindeer hunters eat the rumen content of reindeer, a potential source of some EFA?s. There is no evidence that Neanderthal caught salmon, but there is such for Upper Paleolithic people in Europe. There is no evidence that the content of true stomachs has ever been eaten by hunters. Neanderthal was thus vulnerable as his athletic physiology required large supplies of volatile fatty acids which he historically, as a carnivore in food habits, readily obtained from the fat of the monogastric megafauna. That?s what allowed him to thrive during the many months of winter when no greenery was in sight. Neanderthal hearths, in the absence of Cro-magnids, are about 1/5th as frequent as those of the Upper Paleolithic. With Cro-magnids, greatly out-numbering Neanderthal and thriving on reindeer and salmon ? and ? hunting the megafauna for sport, there would an effect on megafauna abundance, reducing this the staff of live for Neanderthal. And there was no ready way to counter-adapt, as reindeer were inferior food to Neanderthal, as Neanderthal had no calendar, and fishing for salmon was apparently not in. Cro-magnids, which were not war-like and whose recovered skeletons show no evidence of homicide, were much too smart to confront the athletically much superior Neanderthal. Hybridization was out as the physically highly demanding way of hunting by Neanderthal could not be practiced by hybrids. Hybrid disadvantage kept the gene pools apart. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:15:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:15:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect: The Asian aesthetic Message-ID: The Asian aesthetic http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?link=yes&P_Article=12875 Prospect Magazine, 4.11 Hollywood used to give just a nod to the east. But now a real alternative has emerged to change the face of world cinema Mark Cousins At the end of August, a Chinese film, Hero, topped the US box office chart for the first time, despite already being available on DVD. A lush kung fu film in the manner of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it was directed by former cinematographer Zhang Yimou. Screen International called it "one of the most eagerly awaited films in Asian film history. " It also went to number one in France and cut a swathe through the box office in many Asian countries. This is unheard of, yet Zhang's follow-up, the even more beautiful House of Flying Daggers, looks set to follow Hero's extraordinary breakthrough. Shot partly in the rust-red forests of Ukraine, it has already broken box office records in China itself. Something remarkable is happening in Asian cinema, and Hollywood has cottoned on. "Check out the latest US movie production slate and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hollywood is turning Japanese," commented the Guardian in July. "And Korean. With a dash of Thai and Hong Kong thrown in." No fewer than seven new versions of box office hits from Asia are preparing to go before western cameras. Tom Cruise is developing a remake of the Hong Kong/Thai horror picture, The Eye; Martin Scorsese is in pre-production with a new version of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong policier; a Japanese thriller, Dark Water, is being reworked for Jennifer Connelly; British director Gurinder Chadha is remaking the Korean feminist crime comedy, My Wife is a Gangster. This is not the first time that Hollywood's imitation of Asian cinema has seemed like flattery. Star Wars borrowed from Kurosawa; the Matrix films used Hong Kong fight techniques. But western film industries have never banked on the east to this degree before. Virtually every Hollywood studio has optioned an Asian project. Their interest in the continent's movies has become a groundswell. Part of this is the usual Tinseltown faddiness, but that is not all. Dark Water, The Eye and The Ring films - also being updated in the US - unnerved Hollywood because they beat it at its own game. They found new, subtle, inventive ways of doing what producers in southern California have spent a century perfecting: jangling audiences' nervous systems. From Frankenstein to Jaws and The Blair Witch Project, western cinema has prided itself on being able to electrify filmgoers with novel terrors. All of a sudden, Japan and Korea have stolen its thunder. Directors from these countries are using the power of suggestion, and turning the screw of tension to scare audiences profoundly. They build up tension more slowly, hint at unseen horrors, use sound more evocatively. The American studio system is constantly in search of fresh material and ideas. In the last few years, Asia has been western cinema's new source. Asian cinema, however, doesn't merit our attention merely because it has captured Hollywood's. Despite the brouhaha caused by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in Cannes this year, the lasting impression of the festival was the overwhelming beauty of a quartet of films from China, Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand. I have been going to Cannes for well over a decade but had never seen audiences applaud the visual magnificence of an individual scene as they did with House of Flying Daggers. Meanwhile, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows was one of the greatest works of observation that cinema has produced. And although I had to stand throughout Wong Kar Wai's two-hour 2046, the world it created was so ravishing I didn't even shift on my feet. Finally, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady delivered one of the festival's greatest coups. While Hollywood can easily ransack Asian horror cinema to renew its own techniques, it is unlikely ever to match the beauty of these four. How is it that, despite the occasional blink of recognition, the west has remained so blind to Asian cinema for so long? There has always been a sense in which America and Europe owned film. They invented it at the end of the 19th century in unfashionable places like New Jersey, Leeds and the suburbs of Lyons. At first, they saw their clumsy new camera-projectors merely as more profitable versions of Victorian lantern shows. Then the best of the pioneers looked beyond the mechanical and fairground properties of their invention. A few directors, now mostly forgotten, saw that the flickering new medium was more than a divertissement. This crass commercial invention began to cross the Rubicon to art. DW Griffith in California glimpsed its grace, German directors used it as an analogue to the human mind and the modernising city, Soviets emphasised its agitational and intellectual properties, and the Italians reconfigured it on an operatic scale. So heady were these first decades of cinema that America and Europe can be forgiven for assuming that they were the only game in town. In less than 20 years western cinema had grown from nickelodeon to vast rococo picture palace; its unknowns became the most famous people in the world; it made millions. It never occurred to its Wall Street backers that another continent might borrow their magic box and make it its own. But film industries emerged in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Delhi and Bombay, some of which would outgrow those in the west. India made its first feature around 1912 and was producing more than 200 films a year by 1930, Chinese production managed 400 films between 1928 and 1931 alone, and Japan was quicker off the mark - four production companies were established by 1908, four years before Hollywood became a production centre, and by the end of the 1920s, Japan was releasing 400 films a year. Vast production factories were built. On sound stages as grand as anything in Hollywood or Rome, huge sets re-created scenes from Asian history. In some ways the film industries of the east mirrored their western forbears. Just like scandal-ridden Hollywood, the eastern film world killed the thing it loved, its movie stars. The Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu was as famous and enigmatic as Greta Garbo, yet the Shanghai tabloids hounded her. When she took a fatal overdose in 1935 (aged 25), her funeral procession was three miles long, three women committed suicide during it and the New York Times ran a front page story, calling it "the most spectacular funeral of the century." Despite her key role in Chinese cinema in its heyday, she appears in almost no western film encyclopedias. She was better known in America and Europe than almost any other figure from Asian cinema. And yet her fame did not introduce eastern to western cinema in any meaningful way. In the five years before Ruan's death, her country had produced more than 500 films, mostly conventionally made in studios in Shanghai, without soundtracks. As western film industries refitted for sound, the film industries of China and Japan entered a golden age. Tokyo and Shanghai were as much the centres of movie innovation as southern California. China's best directors - Bu Wancang and Yuan Muzhi - introduced elements of realism to their stories. The Peach Girl (1931) and Street Angel (1937) respectively are regularly voted among the best ever made in the country. But after 1937, Yuan Muzhi went to Yen'an to work with Mao's communists, and in 1938 the Chinese film industry moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There, directors like Wang Weiyi and Zhu Shilin paved the way for the flourishing of Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. India set a different course. In the west, the arrival of talkies gave birth to a new genre - the musical - but in India, every one of the 5,000 films made between 1931 and the mid-1950s had musical interludes. The effects of this were far-reaching. Movie performers had to be able to dance. There were two parallel star systems - that of actors and that of playback singers. The films were stylistically more wide-ranging than the western musical, encompassing realism and escapist dance within individual sequences, and they were often three hours long rather than Hollywood's 90 minutes. The cost of such productions, combined with the national reformism of the Congress party, resulted in a distinctive national style of cinema. Performed in Hindi (rather than any of the numerous regional languages) and addressing social and peasant themes in an optimistic and romantic way, "All India films" (the style associated with Bollywood) represented nearly half the continent's annual output of 250-270 movies throughout the 1940s and 1950s. They were often made in Bombay, the centre of what is now known as Bollywood. By the 1970s, annual production in India reached 500 and a decade later it had doubled once more. All India Films, as well as some of the more radical work inspired by the Indian Communist party, found markets in the middle east, Africa and the Soviet Union. By the late 1980s, however, the centre of gravity had moved away from Hindi production in Bombay. Madras began to produce an astonishing ten films a week (more than Los Angeles), and there were around 140 productions a year in Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. In Japan, the film industry had long ceased to rival India's in size but was distinctive in two ways. Until the 1930s, commentators called benshis attended every screening, standing in front of the audience, clarifying the action and describing characters. Directors did not need to show every aspect of their tale, and tended to produce tableau-like visuals. Even more unusually, its industry was director-led. Whereas in Hollywood, the producer was the central figure - he chose the stories and hired the director and actors - in Tokyo, the director chose the stories and hired the producer and actors. The model was that of an artist and his studio of apprentices. Employed by a studio as an assistant, a future director worked with senior figures, learned his craft, gained authority, until promoted to director with the power to select screenplays and performers. These radical digressions from the norms of industrial cinema are in part explained by Japan's psychological retreat from 20th-century westernism. Its chauvinistic belief in Japanese superiority led to its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937, to catastrophic effect. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, no national cinema was more artistically accomplished than Japan's. Its directors had considerable freedom, their nation was (over)confident and the result was cinema of the highest order. The films of Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse were the greatest of these. Mizoguchi's were usually set in the 19th century and unpicked the social norms which impeded the liberties of the female characters whom he chose as his focus. From Osaka Elegy (1936) to Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and beyond, he evolved a sinuous way of moving his camera in and around a scene, advancing towards significant details but often retreating at moments of confrontation or emotion. No one had used the camera with such finesse before. Great western directors like Vincent Minnelli and Bernardo Bertolucci would borrow his techniques. Perhaps significantly, given the political climate, Mikio Naruse's best films were also beautifully controlled accounts of women's lives. Even more important for film history, however, is the work of the great Ozu. Born in Tokyo in 1903, he rebelled at school, watched lots of American film comedies in the 1920s, and imported their boisterous irreverence into his own work. Then he rejected much of their physicality and from I Was Born, But... (1932), embarked on a string of domestic films about middle-class families which are the most poised and resigned in world cinema. Brilliantly cast and judged, Ozu's films - the most famous is Tokyo Story (1953) - went further than Mizoguchi's emotional reserve. Where Hollywood cranked up drama, Ozu avoided it. His camera seldom moved. It nestled at seated height, framing people square on, listening quietly to their articulations. This sounds boring, but the effect is the opposite. The families we see are bracingly alive. Their hard-earned wisdom is deeply moving. The human elements alone in Ozu's films would have been enough to endear him to many of those in future generations - Wim Wenders in Germany, Hou Hsiao Hsien in Taiwan and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran - who have called him the greatest of film directors. But there was his technique too. Ozu rejected the conventions of editing, cutting not on action but for visual balance. His films analyse the space in which his characters move rather like the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque - intellectually, unemotionally, from many angles. Even more strikingly, Ozu regularly cut away from his action to a shot of a tree or a kettle or clouds, not to establish a new location but as a moment of repose. Many historians now compare such "pillow shots" to the Buddhist idea that mu - empty space or nothing - is itself an element of composition. By the beginning of the 1950s, and despite the ravages of nationalism, war and independence struggles, the three great Asian powers had national cinemas of distinction. Influenced by western directors, those in the east rethought the medium musically and spatially, making it rapturous or rigorous, according to their own national sensibilities. Western directors still took no notice. They had new darlings by this stage - directors like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Marcel Carne; actors like Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Bob Hope and Humphrey Bogart. But their blindness to Asian cinema was now chronic. Then, in 1951, a film festival in Venice, started by Mussolini's cronies in 1932, awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to a Japanese film - Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. Audiences on the Lido couldn't work out what they loved more, the film's ravishing cinematography, or its philosophical disquisition on relativism. Rashomon went on to be shown in cosmopolitan cities throughout the west and to win the Oscar for best foreign film. (Japanese films won again in 1954 and 1955.) The floodgates opened. Kurosawa had been crowned. The effect was compounded by his remarkable, cancer-themed Ikiru, made two years after Rashomon. Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese were soon paying attention. Japanese cinema was pored over for new discoveries. Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai was f?ted in 1955 and remade in Hollywood in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven. Kurosawa had himself been influenced by John Ford, but at least the flow was now two-way. India, too, found the limelight. A new master director, Mehboob Khan, gained international acclaim - and an Oscar nomination - for Mother India, an epic often compared to Gone with the Wind. In their belated rush to raid the treasures of the east, the western cognoscenti even started to take notice of Japan's least showy director, Ozu. Still, it took a while. Despite festival screenings of his work and six of his films being named "best film of the year" in Japan, Ozu was recognised by few people abroad. Eventually, the British Film Institute called him "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century in any medium, in any country." Wim Wenders declared him "a sacred treasure of the cinema." Watching the Asian films in Cannes this year, I had an idea of what it must have been like in Venice in 1951 or 1954. The sheer loveliness of the breakthrough films of 50 years ago was somehow feminine - certainly delicate, rich, soft, and shallow-focused. Each of the latest new wave of Asian films is highly decorated, tapestry-like, with an emphasis on detail, visual surface, colour and patterning, and centred on a woman, or feminised men. It comes as no surprise, for example, that Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers is so beautiful. His Raise the Red Lantern was visually striking and he started as a cinematographer on the breakthrough work of modern Chinese cinema, Yellow Earth. Daggers, however, may be one of the most photographically distinguished films ever made. In it, the actress Zhang Ziyi, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, plays Mei, a blind dancer in the year 859 who is sympathetic to a revolutionary group threatening the Tang dynasty. An early sequence takes place in a large pavilion decorated entirely by peonies. A local captain suspects that Mei is a subversive and sets her a test. In the pavilion, he surrounds her with 100 vertically mounted drums. She stands in the middle, dressed in a coat of gold silk, embroidered with turquoise chrysanthemums. Presented with dishes of dry beans, the captain flicks one at a drum. The camera follows it though space. As it strikes the taut surface, Mei spins and flicks the enormously long sleeve of her coat in the direction of the sound. It travels as the bean did and strikes the drum in a rococo flourish. Then the captain flicks another bean, and Mei spins and flicks again. Then another. Then a small handful which scatter around the circle of drums. Mei responds to the percussive effect, her sleeves darting and soaring, her face still serene and expressionless, at the centre of the vortex. The bean shots are computer-generated - the most satisfying use of CGI yet. The combination of such cinematic modernity with martial arts choreography, photographic splendour and, centrally, Zhang's enigmatic performance, makes this scene, at once, a classic. If anything, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's 2046 goes even further. It, too, is a widescreen film of seductively shallow focus, surface patterning and feminine beauty. Zhang Ziyi stars again, this time joined by two other great Chinese actresses, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung. Like Wong's previous film, In the Mood for Love, it is an evocative exercise in atmosphere and music, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Tony Leung plays a brilliantined writer caught in a destructive web of relationships. Wong and his cinematographers take the colours and lighting of Edward Hopper but reconfigure them into wide, flat, scroll-like images where everything has a melancholic sheen, where women move in slow motion, their stilettos clicking in night-time alleyways. To this Wong adds a futuristic element. A dazzling bullet train rockets forward through time to the world of 2046, a place where robotic people symbolise the empty state of love. At first glance, the Japanese director Kore-Eda's new film, Nobody Knows, is different from the aesthetic worlds of Zhang and Wong. Set in present-day Japan, it tells the story of a neglectful mother who rents an apartment with one of her children and who, when she moves in, opens her suitcases to reveal two more. In his way, however, the former documentary director is equally interested in stillness, in shallow focus and in production design. The mother leaves her children, but instead of declining into Lord of the Flies chaos, they subtly transform their apartment into a world suitable for themselves: scruffy, but full of play and adventure. Nobody Knows is another tapestry film like Daggers, but it is about the timeless ways in which children amuse themselves. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Tropical Malady is more enigmatic still. In its first half, a soldier befriends a young peasant man who lives in the country. They drift around, sit talking, grow fond of each other. In one scene the soldier puts his head in his friend's lap, in another the soldier licks his hand. As their growing eroticism looks as if it might become explicit, the peasant walks into the jungle. Then the screen goes black: no sound, no picture, as if the film has broken. Then a second film begins. The actors are the same but their situation is more fable-like. A monkey talks to one of the characters, the other is the spirit of a tiger running naked through the jungle. Tropical Malady is likely to be seen as one of the most experimental films of its time, but what is again striking is its gentleness and stillness. Though made in very different countries, the films of Weerasethakul, Zhang, Wong and Kore-eda share certain ideas about art. Just as the work of Ozu can be fully understood only by balancing its psychological aspects with more abstract Buddhist questions of space and stillness, so the influence of Buddhism can be seen in these new films. Despite the range of western cinema today, most of it derives from the assumption that movies are narrative chains of cause and effect, that their characters have fears and desires, and that we follow the film by understanding these fears and desires. The new films of Zhang and the others make similar assumptions but are less driven by them and balance questions of selfhood with Zen ideas about negation and equilibrium. This makes their beauty hard to replicate in the west. But Buddhism is not the whole picture. Another Asian philosophy explains the sense of gender and use of space in these films. Unlike Maoism, which pictured a clear moral opposition between the good workers and bad bosses, and unlike Confucian philosophy, in which masculinity is noble and femininity is not, Taoism is less clear-cut. Morally, it sees good within bad and vice versa. The feminine is a virtue in the same way that emptiness may be for artists. Every one of the great Asian films in the pipeline evinces Taoist ideas of sex and space. In none of them is gender polarised. In all of them, space is crucial. And the influence is acknowledged. Zhang, for example, has talked about the way Chinese painting has affected his work. His shots are often very wide. Space and landscape weigh as heavily within the frame as the human elements. Art historians have long discussed the Taoist component of such paintings. Indian cinema, deriving from Hindu aesthetics, is not currently as innovative as that of other Asian countries. Although Indian film continues to be economically successful, and has become synonymous with high spectacle, the Hindu nationalism of the country's recent, backward-looking BJP government has coincided with a spell of cinematic complacency. As the art form most swayed by money and market, cinema would appear to be too busy to bother with questions of philosophy. Other Asian nations are proving that this is not the case. Just as deep ideas about individual freedom have led to the bracingly driven aspirational cinema of Hollywood, so Buddhism and Taoism explain the distinctiveness of Asian cinema at its best. In Venice in 1951 and Cannes in 2004, audiences left the cinemas with heads full of dazzling images. But the greatness of Rashomon, Ugetsu, 2046 or House of Flying Daggers is, in the end, not to do with imagery at all. Yes, they are pictorially distinctive, but it is their different sense of what a person is, and what space and action are, which makes them new to western eyes. Mark Cousins is author of "The Story of Film" (Pavilion) From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:18:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:18:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Oh, Fine, You're Right. I'm Passive-Aggressive. Message-ID: Oh, Fine, You're Right. I'm Passive-Aggressive. NYT November 16, 2004 By BENEDICT CAREY The marriage seemed to come loose at the seams, one stitch at a time, often during the evening hour between work and dinner. She would be preparing the meal, while he kept her company in the sun room next to kitchen, usually reading the paper. At times the two would provoke each other, as couples do - about money, about holiday plans - but those exchanges often flared out quickly when he would say, simply, "O.K., you're right," and turn back to the news. "Looking back, instead of getting angry, I was doing this as a dismissive way of shutting down the conversation," said Peter G. Hill, 48, a doctor in Massachusetts who has recently separated from his wife. Even reading the paper at that hour was his way of adamantly relaxing, in defiance of whatever it was she thought he should be doing. "It takes two to break up, but I have been accused of being passive-aggressive, and there it is," he said. Everyone knows what it looks like. The friend who perpetually arrives late. The co-worker who neglects to return e-mail messages. The very words: "Nothing. I'm just thinking." Yet while "passive-aggressive" has become a workhorse phrase in marriage counseling and an all-purpose label for almost any difficult character, it is a controversial concept in psychiatry. After some debate, the American Psychiatric Association dropped the behavior pattern from the list of personality disorders in its most recent diagnostic manual - the DSM IV - as too narrow to be a full-blown diagnosis, and not well enough supported by scientific evidence to meet increasingly rigorous standards of definition. The decision is likely to have more effect on teaching guidelines and research than on treatment and insurance coverage. But psychologists and psychiatrists with long experience treating this kind of behavior say it is hard to study precisely because it is so covert, common and widely variable. These experts make a distinction between passive-aggressive behavior, which most people display at times, and passive-aggressive personality, which is ingrained and habitual. In milder forms it can come across as a maddening blend of evasiveness and contrition, agreeableness and impudence, and in severe cases is often masked by more obvious mental illness, like depression. Yet whether pathological or not, they say, the pattern is often traceable to a distinct childhood experience. New research suggests that in many cases it stems from a positive, socially protective instinct - to keep peace at home, avoid costly mistakes at work, even preserve some self-respect. "Some of the people being demeaned as passive-aggressive are in fact being extremely careful not to commit mistakes, a strategy that has been successful for them," if not entirely conscious, said Dr. E. Tory Higgins, director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. They become difficult, he said, "when their cautious instincts are overwhelmed by demands that they perceive as unreasonable." The classic description of the behavior captures a stubborn malcontent, someone who passively resists fulfilling routine tasks, complains of being misunderstood and underappreciated, unreasonably scorns authority and voices exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune. But the phrase itself has its roots in the military. Near the end of World War II, a colonel in the United States War Department used it to describe an "immature" behavior among enlisted men, many of them at the end of long tours: "a neurotic type reaction to routine military stress, manifested by helplessness, or inadequate responses, passiveness, obstructionism or aggressive outbursts." This kind of insolence, among adults protecting themselves from what they saw as unreasonable, arbitrary authority, was in part an adaptive behavior, psychologist say, an effort to preserve some independence amid extreme pressure to conform. A similar family dynamic accounts for early development of the behavior, some researchers argue. Dr. Lorna Benjamin, co-director of a clinic at the University of Utah's Neuropsychiatric Institute in Salt Lake City, said people with strong passive tendencies often grew up in loving but demanding families, which gave them responsibilities they perceived to be unmanageable. First-born children are prime candidates, she said: when younger siblings are born, the oldest may suddenly be expected to take on far more extra work than he or she can handle, and over time begin to resent parents' demands without daring to defy them. This hostile cooperation is at the core of passive-aggression, she and other researchers say, and in later in life it is habitually directed at any authority figure, whether a boss, a teacher or a spouse making demands. These passive-aggressive people, Dr. Benjamin said, "are full of unacknowledged contradiction, of angry kindness, compliant defiance, covert assertiveness." This history hardly excuses the multitude of hedging, foot-dragging mopes that populate everyday life, but it can help explain some of their exploits. One Los Angeles woman, who asked not to be identified (and swore she was not being passive-aggressive), described a former co-worker who intentionally made assignments late to employees when she didn't approve of a project. At the end of some days, she wrote, this archetypal passive-aggressive used to hide under her desk to avoid saying goodnight to people. Sometimes, however, mild passive-aggressive behavior can be an effective means to avoid potentially costly confrontations. In such cases the cooperation is more significant than the underlying resentment or hostility. "A joke can be the most skillful passive-aggressive act there is,'' said Dr. Scott Wetzler, a clinical psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and the author of "Living With the Passive-Aggressive Man." "They recognize a coming confrontation, and have found a clever way to release the tension." It is just this instinctive ability to pre-empt and defuse that, paradoxically, may lead to more problematic passive-aggressive behavior. Dr. Higgins of Columbia has described a personal quality he calls prevention pride, a kind of native caution in the face of new challenges, an effort to avoid all errors. He assesses whether a person is high or low in this style by asking a battery of questions, like how often they broke their parents rules, how often they take risks, how often they have been in trouble by not being careful enough. The style is adaptive, he said, in that it allows people with a certain temperament to avoid failure and embarrassment. In one recent experiment, Dr. Higgins and Dr. Ozlem Ayduk, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, tested how these especially cautious people reacted to conflict in relationships. The researchers had 56 couples who had been together at least two months keep detailed diaries, answering questions about conflicts, thoughts about the relationship, moods and their partners' behavior. After three weeks, the researchers compared the diaries and found that people who had a highly cautious personal style and were especially sensitive to rejection were significantly more likely than the others to respond to conflicts by going silent, withdrawing their affection and acting cold. "The people in this study were not the type who would ever say, 'I hate you' to the person's face because they are so careful not to do something that puts them out there," and directly offend their partner, Dr. Ayduk said. The evidence that this sensitivity can be appealing, at least for a while, is recorded in millions of relationships that have lasted for years. A 45-year-old college instructor in Hawaii recently broke off a long relationship with a man she said was a "wonderful, devoted listener, an extremely sensitive person." But in time, she said, it was apparent that he was also passive-aggressive. On one occasion, she said, he gave away her seat on an airplane while she was finding a storage compartment for her luggage, saying he thought she had taken another seat. On others, he would arrive home early from work and finish off meals they normally shared, without explanation. And when he was in one of his moods, the listening ceased; she may as well not have been in the room. "The challenging thing was, you never know what you did wrong," she said. "That's the difficulty, all these scenarios, I could not point to what I did. I never knew." The person who has become hostile may not know exactly why, either. In some cases, psychologists say, people unable to recognize or express their annoyance often don't feel entitled to it; they instinctually let the "little things" pass without taking the time to find out why they are so angry about them. Unsure of themselves, they take care not to offend a spouse, a co-worker or friend. The anger remains. When the behavior pattern is deeply ingrained and compulsive, it is neither adaptive nor merely bewildering, but can be dangerous, some experts say. At her clinic in Salt Lake City, Dr. Benjamin treats many people with multiple diagnoses, from attention deficit disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to intractable depression, many of them with other problems, like substance abuse or multiple suicide attempts. "And I would say that in close to half of them this passive-aggressive behavior is running the whole show," she said. When and if they do get therapy, psychiatrists say, people with strong passive-aggressive instincts are usually determined to fail: the therapist becomes the scorned authority figure. The patients will take their medications and then report with relish that they don't work. The patients will follow advice and then complain that it is senseless, useless. "They are not doing this on purpose; it's part of a deep-seated ambivalence about getting better," a determination to expose the authority as incompetent, said Dr. Marjorie Klein, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. It is left to the individual therapist's skill to deflect or disarm this determination and get patients to at least experiment with an alternate strategy to engage their lives. In one, called cognitive behavior therapy, they learn to monitor their thoughts, moment by moment, to recognize when they are angry, and to challenge unexamined assumptions about confrontation. For example, some people assume that confronting their boss about a raise will be a catastrophe, said Dr. Wetzler of Montefiore, but it often simply is not the case, especially if they have prepared themselves by learning the market value of their skills at other companies. Yet Dr. Benjamin said that often the childhood roots of the behavior must be faced and felt, and that means revisiting the parental relationship and learning that it does not have to set the pattern for all relationships with authority. "The main challenge is to help them shift from winning by losing to winning by winning," she said, "to see that it is they who benefit most when they win, not their therapist, their spouse or their boss." Just living with the behavior in someone else can be as tough as treating it. To manage garden variety passive-aggressive behavior, psychiatrists often advise a kind of protective engagement: don't attack the person; that only reinforces your position as an authority making demands. Take into account the probable cause of the person's unexpressed anger and acknowledge it, if possible, when being stonewalled during a discussion. And be sure to be on guard against likely retaliation. "If he agrees to go over to your relatives' place for Thanksgiving, but you know he's upset about it, make sure you have alternate transportation to get over there," Dr. Wetzler said. "He may take the car and not manage to get home in time to make it." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/health/psychology/16pass.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:20:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:20:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap Message-ID: God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap New York Times, 5.1.4 "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of The Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at www.edge.org. Roger Schank Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning" Irrational choices. I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them. Richard Dawkins Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale" I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. Judith Rich Harris Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption" I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection processes were involved in human evolution. The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness. The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it. Kenneth Ford Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World" I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy. I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there. I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life, once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of temperature, acidity, pressure, light level and so on. Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter. Joseph LeDoux Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self" For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different. Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings. There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist. Lynn Margulis Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution" I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and eventually proved to be true beyond doubt. What? That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drumbeats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals. David Myers Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition" As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms: 1. There is a God. 2. It's not me (and it's also not you). Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. And that is why I further believe that we should a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!), b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment. This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse. Robert Sapolsky Neuroscientist, Stanford University, author, "A Primate's Memoir" Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ... I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia. Donald Hoffman Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence" I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival. If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. Nicholas Humphrey Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh" I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives. Philip Zimbardo Psychologist, emeritus professor, Stanford; author, "Shyness" I believe that the prison guards at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, who worked the night shift in Tier 1A, where prisoners were physically and psychologically abused, had surrendered their free will and personal responsibility during these episodes of mayhem. But I could not prove it in a court of law. These eight Army reservists were trapped in a unique situation in which the behavioral context came to dominate individual dispositions, values and morality to such an extent that they were transformed into mindless actors alienated from their normal sense of personal accountability for their actions - at that time and place. The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's "Lord of the Flies." The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control and more. Philip W. Anderson Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it. My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do. The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked. Alison Gopnik Psychologist, University of California, Berkeley; co-author, "The Scientist in the Crib" I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces. David Buss Psychologist, University of Texas; author, "The Evolution of Desire" True love. I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love. While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:21:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:21:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Message-ID: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' New York Times, 5.1.4 By GINA KOLATA With obesity much on Americans' minds, an entire industry has sprung up selling diets and diet books, meal replacements and exercise programs, nutritional supplements and Internet-based coaching, all in an effort to help people lose weight. But a new study, published today, finds little evidence that commercial weight-loss programs are effective in helping people drop excess pounds. Almost no rigorous studies of the programs have been carried out, the researchers report. And federal officials say that companies are often unwilling to conduct such studies, arguing that they are in the business of treatment, not research. "In general, the industry has always been opposed to making outcomes disclosures," said Richard Cleland, the assistant director for advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "They have always given various rationales," Mr. Cleland said, from "'It's too expensive,' to even arguing that part of this is selling the dream, and if you know what the truth is, it's harder to sell the dream." The study, published in today's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, found that with the exception of Weight Watchers, no commercial program had published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate. And even in the Weight Watchers study, the researchers said, the results were modest, with a 5 percent weight loss after three to six months of dieting, much of it regained. Advertisements for weight loss centers often make it seem that success is guaranteed for anyone who really wants it. They feature smiling, thin, healthy people - results, the advertisements imply, of simply following the program. Scientists, however, want something more. They would like to see carefully controlled studies that follow program participants over a couple of years and compare their success with that of nonparticipants. But that sort of study is almost never done, said Dr. Thomas Wadden, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the new study. It is not as if no one has asked the companies to conduct such research, he and others said. About a decade ago, Dr. Wadden, Mr. Cleland and others met with commercial weight loss companies at the Federal Trade Commission to discuss getting some solid data on the programs' effectiveness. "We tried to come up with a set of voluntary guidelines with the idea that these would be disclosures that weight loss centers would make prior to consumers' signing on the bottom line," said Mr. Cleland. "At the end of the day we agreed to disagree on the issue of outcomes disclosure. I was convinced that it could be done, but it was not something the industry was going to voluntarily do." The F.T.C., he said, could not force companies to do the studies. Lynn McAfee, the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, was aghast at the conclusion. "I don't understand how you can have a product you never evaluate for effectiveness," Ms. McAfee said. "It was a slap in the face to all people of size." Still, patients and their doctors need information, Dr. Wadden said. So he and his colleague, Dr. Adam Gilden Tsai, collected what information they could on the prices, the methods, and the success of nine commercial weight loss programs, like Jenny Craig, eDiets and Optifast and self-help programs, like Overeaters Anonymous. The investigators looked at the data presented on company Web sites, called the companies and searched medical journals for published papers. In their review, they included studies published from 1966 to 2003, finding 108 that assessed commercial programs. Of those, only 10 met their criteria. For example, the studies had to have lasted at least 12 weeks and to have assessed weight-loss outcomes after a year. Dr. Wadden said that even in that handful of studies, hardly any of them reported data for everyone who enrolled in the weight-loss programs. Most included only people who had completed the programs, making the outcomes "definitely best-case scenarios," he said. The costs of commercial weight-loss programs can vary from $65 for three months on eDiets to $167 for the same time in Weight Watchers to more than $2,000 for a medically supervised low-calorie diet. "Given the lack of good comparative data, it may make sense to try the cheaper alternatives first," Mr. Cleland said. Other experts said that patients might want to forgo the programs altogether. "Doctors could do as well as these programs" in helping people lose weight, said Dr. George Blackburn, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School, simply by counseling people to diet and exercise. He added, "Doctors can, ought to and are qualified to get involved." The Weight Watchers study, published in 2003 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 423 people who weighed an average of 205 pounds. Half the participants were randomly assigned to attend Weight Watchers meetings and follow the program. The other half tried to lose weight on their own. After two years, the participants in Weight Watchers had lost an average of 6.4 pounds. The other group had lost no weight. Neither group showed a change in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose or insulin. "We found no such evaluations of Jenny Craig or L.A. Weight Loss," Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai wrote. Kent Coykendall, a vice president of strategic planning and business development for Jenny Craig, said the company had begun a randomized study of 70 people on the program. But in the meantime, he said, Jenny Craig has the records of tens of thousands of participants attesting to the fact that they lost weight - "a plethora of real data on real people in the real world under real circumstances," Mr. Coykendall said. In their study, Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai also looked at programs, like Optifast, Health Management Resources and Medifast, that provide participants with medical supervision and a low-calorie diet - 800 to to 1500 calories per day. Patients who stay with these programs, the companies say, can lose as much as 15 to 25 percent of their weight in three to six months. But the researchers found no randomized controlled trials of their effectiveness. And the studies that were conducted independently of the companies showed that people on the low-calorie diets weighed about the same a year later as people on conventional diets. In addition, the companies' own reports found high dropout rates, with nearly half the participants in an Optifast study dropping out in 26 weeks. But Dr. Larry Stifler, the founder and president of Health Management Resources, objected. "Their criteria - one of the things they always like to see - is randomized controlled trials," Dr. Stifler said. But such studies, he said, are not feasible when a company is offering a treatment. "People can't be told they can either join the program or be in a control group. That's not what this treatment is about," he said. Dr. Stifler said his company had data showing that patients dropped large amounts of weight if they stuck with the diet. When the company assessed patients three years later, some had still kept the weight off. Much of that data has not been published, Dr. Stifler said, but it has been presented at professional meetings. Robert Hallock, vice president and general counsel for Medifast, also said his company had unpublished but promising data. The company keeps track of thousands of patients, he said, and "everyone knows that low-calorie diets and structured programs get huge amounts of weight loss." As for Internet-based weight loss programs, the only study Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai found was one that Dr. Wadden, Dr. Leslie Womble and their colleagues conducted, using eDiets, which provides clients with low-calorie recipes and foods. They randomly assigned participants to use eDiets or a standard behavioral weight-loss manual. They also provided counseling and weigh-ins to all the participants. After a year, the eDiet participants had lost 1.1 percent of their weight while those using the manual had lost 4 percent. Susan Burke, vice president of nutrition services at eDiets, says the program has changed since 2001, when that study was done. "It's more personalized and flexible," she says, and clients who use the support programs and diet lose weight. Programs like Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS) and Overeaters Anonymous are free or charge only nominal fees, but it is not clear how participants fare. Carol Trinastic, a spokeswoman for TOPS, said the organization collected data on weight loss. The most recent, from 2003, indicate that members lost 1,271,466 pounds or 5.9 pounds per person. But the modest and temporary weight losses with diet programs are not a surprise, Dr. Wadden said, because no one knows how to elicit permanent weight loss. "I don't blame the diet programs. They're fighting biology," Dr. Wadden said. "Even in the best of circumstances, people will regain a third of what they lost in one year and two-thirds in two years and they may be back to base line in five years." He added, "Weight loss is not for the fainthearted." Of course, some people do lose weight and keep it off, often succeeding after repeated attempts to diet, said Dr. Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry at Brown and a co-founder of the National Weight Control Registry. To be part of the registry, people must lose 30 pounds or more, by any means, including surgery, and keep the weight off for at least a year. If they regain, they remain in the registry, Dr. Wing said. "Once you're in, you're in," she said. In 10 years, the registry has enrolled 4,700 people. Most gained back some weight, but very few gained back all they lost, Dr. Wing said. But there also are those who say they have tried and tried to reduce, only to regain the weight they so painfully lost. For many, weight loss is never really out of their minds. Often, the fatter the person, the greater the concern. "Your whole life is a diet when you're overweight," said Janet B. Forton, a Pennsylvania woman who finally had weight-loss surgery last year after struggling her entire life to lose weight. "You go to bed at night praying you make the right choices the next day." Why do so many people keep trying to lose weight when they so often gain it right back again? Dr. Peter Herman and Dr. Janet Polivy, psychologists at the University of Toronto, say that just the idea of dieting may give people a positive lift. "It turns out that simply declaring you are going on a diet makes you feel better," Dr. Herman said. "It seems to boost people's spirits. They feel they are empowering themselves and they are already imagining themselves as the new and better selves, taking control of their lives." Ms. McAfee has a different explanation. "It is so penalized to be fat in this society that it's an investment in your future not to be fat," she said. "It you're an ambitious person you'll do anything," and even if the lost weight is regained, "you'll do it again and again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jan 4 21:22:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 16:22:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Message-ID: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 4 23:32:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:32:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Message-ID: <01C4F272.A467DC00.shovland@mindspring.com> I came across this while trying to figure out which nutrients might jumpstart the production of the leutinizing hormone: http://www.np.edu.sg/~dept-bio/biochemistry/aab/topics/aab_lipid.htm The punchline is about 9-10 pages down: reduced fat, reduced carbs, normal protein, exercise. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:21 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' Diet and Lose Weight? Scientists Say 'Prove It!' New York Times, 5.1.4 By GINA KOLATA With obesity much on Americans' minds, an entire industry has sprung up selling diets and diet books, meal replacements and exercise programs, nutritional supplements and Internet-based coaching, all in an effort to help people lose weight. But a new study, published today, finds little evidence that commercial weight-loss programs are effective in helping people drop excess pounds. Almost no rigorous studies of the programs have been carried out, the researchers report. And federal officials say that companies are often unwilling to conduct such studies, arguing that they are in the business of treatment, not research. "In general, the industry has always been opposed to making outcomes disclosures," said Richard Cleland, the assistant director for advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "They have always given various rationales," Mr. Cleland said, from "'It's too expensive,' to even arguing that part of this is selling the dream, and if you know what the truth is, it's harder to sell the dream." The study, published in today's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, found that with the exception of Weight Watchers, no commercial program had published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate. And even in the Weight Watchers study, the researchers said, the results were modest, with a 5 percent weight loss after three to six months of dieting, much of it regained. Advertisements for weight loss centers often make it seem that success is guaranteed for anyone who really wants it. They feature smiling, thin, healthy people - results, the advertisements imply, of simply following the program. Scientists, however, want something more. They would like to see carefully controlled studies that follow program participants over a couple of years and compare their success with that of nonparticipants. But that sort of study is almost never done, said Dr. Thomas Wadden, director of the weight and eating disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the new study. It is not as if no one has asked the companies to conduct such research, he and others said. About a decade ago, Dr. Wadden, Mr. Cleland and others met with commercial weight loss companies at the Federal Trade Commission to discuss getting some solid data on the programs' effectiveness. "We tried to come up with a set of voluntary guidelines with the idea that these would be disclosures that weight loss centers would make prior to consumers' signing on the bottom line," said Mr. Cleland. "At the end of the day we agreed to disagree on the issue of outcomes disclosure. I was convinced that it could be done, but it was not something the industry was going to voluntarily do." The F.T.C., he said, could not force companies to do the studies. Lynn McAfee, the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, was aghast at the conclusion. "I don't understand how you can have a product you never evaluate for effectiveness," Ms. McAfee said. "It was a slap in the face to all people of size." Still, patients and their doctors need information, Dr. Wadden said. So he and his colleague, Dr. Adam Gilden Tsai, collected what information they could on the prices, the methods, and the success of nine commercial weight loss programs, like Jenny Craig, eDiets and Optifast and self-help programs, like Overeaters Anonymous. The investigators looked at the data presented on company Web sites, called the companies and searched medical journals for published papers. In their review, they included studies published from 1966 to 2003, finding 108 that assessed commercial programs. Of those, only 10 met their criteria. For example, the studies had to have lasted at least 12 weeks and to have assessed weight-loss outcomes after a year. Dr. Wadden said that even in that handful of studies, hardly any of them reported data for everyone who enrolled in the weight-loss programs. Most included only people who had completed the programs, making the outcomes "definitely best-case scenarios," he said. The costs of commercial weight-loss programs can vary from $65 for three months on eDiets to $167 for the same time in Weight Watchers to more than $2,000 for a medically supervised low-calorie diet. "Given the lack of good comparative data, it may make sense to try the cheaper alternatives first," Mr. Cleland said. Other experts said that patients might want to forgo the programs altogether. "Doctors could do as well as these programs" in helping people lose weight, said Dr. George Blackburn, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School, simply by counseling people to diet and exercise. He added, "Doctors can, ought to and are qualified to get involved." The Weight Watchers study, published in 2003 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 423 people who weighed an average of 205 pounds. Half the participants were randomly assigned to attend Weight Watchers meetings and follow the program. The other half tried to lose weight on their own. After two years, the participants in Weight Watchers had lost an average of 6.4 pounds. The other group had lost no weight. Neither group showed a change in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose or insulin. "We found no such evaluations of Jenny Craig or L.A. Weight Loss," Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai wrote. Kent Coykendall, a vice president of strategic planning and business development for Jenny Craig, said the company had begun a randomized study of 70 people on the program. But in the meantime, he said, Jenny Craig has the records of tens of thousands of participants attesting to the fact that they lost weight - "a plethora of real data on real people in the real world under real circumstances," Mr. Coykendall said. In their study, Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai also looked at programs, like Optifast, Health Management Resources and Medifast, that provide participants with medical supervision and a low-calorie diet - 800 to to 1500 calories per day. Patients who stay with these programs, the companies say, can lose as much as 15 to 25 percent of their weight in three to six months. But the researchers found no randomized controlled trials of their effectiveness. And the studies that were conducted independently of the companies showed that people on the low-calorie diets weighed about the same a year later as people on conventional diets. In addition, the companies' own reports found high dropout rates, with nearly half the participants in an Optifast study dropping out in 26 weeks. But Dr. Larry Stifler, the founder and president of Health Management Resources, objected. "Their criteria - one of the things they always like to see - is randomized controlled trials," Dr. Stifler said. But such studies, he said, are not feasible when a company is offering a treatment. "People can't be told they can either join the program or be in a control group. That's not what this treatment is about," he said. Dr. Stifler said his company had data showing that patients dropped large amounts of weight if they stuck with the diet. When the company assessed patients three years later, some had still kept the weight off. Much of that data has not been published, Dr. Stifler said, but it has been presented at professional meetings. Robert Hallock, vice president and general counsel for Medifast, also said his company had unpublished but promising data. The company keeps track of thousands of patients, he said, and "everyone knows that low-calorie diets and structured programs get huge amounts of weight loss." As for Internet-based weight loss programs, the only study Dr. Wadden and Dr. Tsai found was one that Dr. Wadden, Dr. Leslie Womble and their colleagues conducted, using eDiets, which provides clients with low-calorie recipes and foods. They randomly assigned participants to use eDiets or a standard behavioral weight-loss manual. They also provided counseling and weigh-ins to all the participants. After a year, the eDiet participants had lost 1.1 percent of their weight while those using the manual had lost 4 percent. Susan Burke, vice president of nutrition services at eDiets, says the program has changed since 2001, when that study was done. "It's more personalized and flexible," she says, and clients who use the support programs and diet lose weight. Programs like Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS) and Overeaters Anonymous are free or charge only nominal fees, but it is not clear how participants fare. Carol Trinastic, a spokeswoman for TOPS, said the organization collected data on weight loss. The most recent, from 2003, indicate that members lost 1,271,466 pounds or 5.9 pounds per person. But the modest and temporary weight losses with diet programs are not a surprise, Dr. Wadden said, because no one knows how to elicit permanent weight loss. "I don't blame the diet programs. They're fighting biology," Dr. Wadden said. "Even in the best of circumstances, people will regain a third of what they lost in one year and two-thirds in two years and they may be back to base line in five years." He added, "Weight loss is not for the fainthearted." Of course, some people do lose weight and keep it off, often succeeding after repeated attempts to diet, said Dr. Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry at Brown and a co-founder of the National Weight Control Registry. To be part of the registry, people must lose 30 pounds or more, by any means, including surgery, and keep the weight off for at least a year. If they regain, they remain in the registry, Dr. Wing said. "Once you're in, you're in," she said. In 10 years, the registry has enrolled 4,700 people. Most gained back some weight, but very few gained back all they lost, Dr. Wing said. But there also are those who say they have tried and tried to reduce, only to regain the weight they so painfully lost. For many, weight loss is never really out of their minds. Often, the fatter the person, the greater the concern. "Your whole life is a diet when you're overweight," said Janet B. Forton, a Pennsylvania woman who finally had weight-loss surgery last year after struggling her entire life to lose weight. "You go to bed at night praying you make the right choices the next day." Why do so many people keep trying to lose weight when they so often gain it right back again? Dr. Peter Herman and Dr. Janet Polivy, psychologists at the University of Toronto, say that just the idea of dieting may give people a positive lift. "It turns out that simply declaring you are going on a diet makes you feel better," Dr. Herman said. "It seems to boost people's spirits. They feel they are empowering themselves and they are already imagining themselves as the new and better selves, taking control of their lives." Ms. McAfee has a different explanation. "It is so penalized to be fat in this society that it's an investment in your future not to be fat," she said. "It you're an ambitious person you'll do anything," and even if the lost weight is regained, "you'll do it again and again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jan 4 23:33:55 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 15:33:55 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 02:13:33 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 18:13:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <034501c4f2cc$2d052aa0$7506f604@S0027397558> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated exit off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and asked if he needed help. Turns out that he was on his way to a medical appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, and had become very confused trying to decipher his secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was recently widowed and was seeing his wife's ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of his ability with glaucoma procedures. Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I then asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not make it in time". "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm continuing....he alarmed me during my last appointment when he was talking about doing corrective eye surgery". "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the stranger. Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement age. "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands didn't falter and I was always on top of each case." As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about comparisons between repairing eye stuff and capillary surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright and brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different from capillaries? Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we "looked" with our hearts? Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his role of physician? I'd say that if many of us can continue with our calling, doctors need to do the same. But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger partner. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, > Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR --snip-- From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Jan 5 14:04:10 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 09:04:10 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> Quoting Steve Hovland : > > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) And live longer. ;-) Christian > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM > To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life > Spans, Critics Say > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR > > WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses > the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it > assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and > measured. But many population experts say they believe that > Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the > 21st century, making the program's financial problems even > worse. > > President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over > the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not > only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth > rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. > > Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last > century, and many independent demographers, citing the > promise of biomedical research and the experience of some > other industrialized countries, predict significant > increases in this century. The Social Security > Administration foresees a much slower rise. > > "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the > fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's > projections of longevity appear too conservative," said > Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, > one of the nation's leading demographers. > > Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in > life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical > research establishment is routinely producing important > breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a > variety of diseases." > > Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National > Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of > Health, said: "There is a long history of government > actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in > life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well > below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries > are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the > potential room for improvement." > > Tables published by the government's National Center for > Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was > 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 > in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security > trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just > six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A > separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows > more rapid growth. > > Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be > 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different > methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached > much earlier, in 2050. > > Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will > reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it > will exceed 86 in 2050. > > For the American population as a whole in the last century, > most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from > 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy > among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after > 1950. > > Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security > Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain > forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular > disease, beginning in the late 1960's." > > The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower > decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 > years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that > mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to > 2000. > > Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at > the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee > death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing > to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. > In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in > other developed countries has accelerated in recent > decades." > > The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. > > > "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this > issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In > the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the > position of other agencies and demographers." > > Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of > longer life on Social Security's solvency. > > "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy > could be offset in several ways that do not involve a > reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. > Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. > > People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or > the size of the working-age population could increase > because of higher birth rates or a larger number of > immigrants. > > Further, some population experts foresee developments that > could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social > Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of > epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of > Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in > life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of > obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious > diseases. > > "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, > vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic > engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the > gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th > century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in > sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. > > Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and > communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline > in the 21st century." > > On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the > program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, > life expectancy in the United States is far from any > natural or biological limits. > > "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is > approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts > have repeatedly been proved wrong." > > At various times, different countries have had the highest > reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable > regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life > expectancy in the leading country has increased an average > of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. > > David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the > program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National > Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers > outside the government think that death rates will continue > to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the > projections of the Social Security Administration. Most > think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than > Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of > Social Security." > > Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend > toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a > significant decline in chronic disability among the > elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social > Security benefits before they reach 65. > > Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to > raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such > proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their > lives in physically demanding jobs. > > Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement > Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life > expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the > rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could > strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as > well as Social Security, she said. > > "The United States is the richest major country in the > world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. > Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated > with income." > > She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at > age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." > > One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so > rich relative to its peers if you look at the average > income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." > > http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From ross.buck at uconn.edu Wed Jan 5 17:11:57 2005 From: ross.buck at uconn.edu (Ross Buck) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 12:11:57 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <034501c4f2cc$2d052aa0$7506f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <200501051725.j05HPQ008712@tick.javien.com> I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, but of course his job did not depend all that much on hand-eye coordination! Cheers, Ross Ross Buck, Ph. D. Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology Communication Sciences U-1085 University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-1085 860-486-4494 fax 860-486-5422 buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Geraldine Reinhardt Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Today on my way home I as usual took my designated exit off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and asked if he needed help. Turns out that he was on his way to a medical appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, and had become very confused trying to decipher his secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was recently widowed and was seeing his wife's ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of his ability with glaucoma procedures. Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I then asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not make it in time". "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm continuing....he alarmed me during my last appointment when he was talking about doing corrective eye surgery". "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the stranger. Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement age. "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands didn't falter and I was always on top of each case." As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about comparisons between repairing eye stuff and capillary surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright and brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different from capillaries? Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we "looked" with our hearts? Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his role of physician? I'd say that if many of us can continue with our calling, doctors need to do the same. But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger partner. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, > Critics Say > NYT December 31, 2004 > By ROBERT PEAR --snip-- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 18:24:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:24:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Fewer New York Schools Are Cited for Poor Performance Message-ID: Fewer New York Schools Are Cited for Poor Performance New York Times, 5.1.5 By ELISSA GOOTMAN [So poor performing schools do get closed! Though not many.] Fewer New York City schools are in danger of being shut down by the state for poor performance this year than in previous years, state and city education officials announced yesterday. The number of city schools on the state list, known as schools under registration review, fell to 35 from 46 last year and from an all-time high of 104 six years ago. The state started compiling the list in 1989. Statewide, there are 52 schools on the list. Sixteen city schools were taken off the list after showing significant improvement on last year's standardized test scores, while seven city schools were added. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the newly truncated list proved that the changes he has imposed in the past two years are working. They include giving schools literacy and math coaches and parent coordinators and instituting a uniform curriculum in elementary schools. "Today's announcement is another strong indication that we're turning the corner," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We all know that there is a lot of work still to be done to create the public school system that our children deserve, and we know success won't happen overnight. Expecting that is folly." But others were more circumspect, noting that even fewer schools - six - were added to the list two years ago, before the mayor's changes were imposed. Between 16 and 19 schools have been removed from the list for each of the last eight years. "I would say, O.K., it's a starting point, but golly you're a long way from the finish line," said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the state Board of Regents from New York City. "If you were a parent of a kid in one of those SURR schools, how would you feel?" Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, noted that many of the schools that were removed from the list this year and last had been part of the Chancellor's District, a collection of troubled schools that, under the two previous chancellors, received special attention like smaller classes and extra teacher training. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein dismantled the special grouping. In recent years, the list of schools under registration review has often been confused with another list of failing schools: the Schools in Need of Improvement. That list, which is required under the federal No Child Left Behind law, includes many more schools (328 in New York City this year) because it uses a higher threshold for success and judges schools based on both their overall performance and the performance of various sub-groups, like special education students. One of the city schools identified as failing yesterday was Far Rockaway High School in Queens, which on Monday was the scene of a triumphant news conference at which the mayor and the chancellor proclaimed victory in their efforts to crack down on disorder there and at other dangerous city schools. Chancellor Klein said the apparent contradiction could be easily explained. "One of the reasons it's on the SURR list is because they lost control of the school," he said. "Instead of focusing on teaching and learning, they were focusing on disruptive behaviors." Mr. Klein said that in the next few weeks, city education officials would decide whether to close any schools based on the new figures. Since the 1997-1998 school year, 38 city schools under registration review have been or are being closed. Elsewhere in the state, four schools were added to the list: Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, Stanton Academy and Public School 37 in Buffalo, and Hempstead High School on Long Island. Other city schools added to the list were the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Manhattan; and, in the Bronx, P.S. 156, Junior High School 151, P.S. 230, P.S. 396 and the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Edna Straus, the principal of Middle School 88 in Brooklyn, where the mayor held a news conference yesterday, said she got her school off the list by "constantly looking at data" on student performance and recruiting certified math teachers through the Teaching Fellows program, which enables people in other professions to become teachers. She said she was frustrated to still be labeled a School in Need of Improvement but thrilled to be removed from the most dire of failing schools lists. "When parents have an image of a SURR school, they have an image of a school that's in chaos," she said. "That doesn't exist here." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/education/05school.html From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 18:25:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:25:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: F. K. Freas, Who Drew the Devilish Face of Mad Magazine, Dies at 82 Message-ID: F. K. Freas, Who Drew the Devilish Face of Mad Magazine, Dies at 82 New York Times, 5.1.5 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Frank Kelly Freas, an artist and illustrator whose work included luminous images of amiable aliens beloved by science-fiction fans, the jug-eared visage of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad magazine and the crew shoulder patch for Skylab I astronauts, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82. His wife, Laura Brodian Freas, confirmed his death in an interview with The Associated Press. Mr. Freas (pronounced Freeze) was best known for the illustrations in more than 300 magazines and books that won him 11 Hugo awards, presented by the World Science Fiction Society and considered among the highest honors for a science-fiction illustrator. His whimsical, highly personalized style was characterized by vibrant colors and a sort of cosmic haze well suited for depicting bejeweled alien princesses. Wrinkles and other details added realism. Mr. Freas did not invent Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed champion of adolescent rebellion whose motto was "What, me worry?" and who was given to making pronouncements like "A teacher is someone who talks in our sleep." But he told The Virginian-Pilot in 2001 that his illustrations gave "Alfie" his personality. Mad's freckled mascot was created by Norman Mingo and first appeared in a Mad Reader paperback in December 1954. He next appeared on the cover of Mad in March 1955. Mr. Freas started at Mad in February 1957 and by July 1958 was the magazine's new cover artist. He painted most of its covers until October 1962. Among his more memorable works was a 1960 painting of a green-tinged Neuman announcing, "This magazine is revolting." His "Great Moments in Medicine" illustration showed a recumbent patient and surrounding family members shocked when presented with a doctor's bill. A barrage of enraged letters from doctors followed. One pointed out that one of the doctor's instruments was a gauge used in aircraft manufacture, a perhaps understandable slip on the part of a science-fiction writer who once spent a week in a nuclear submarine in pursuit of verisimilitude. Other works by Mr. Freas ranged from six posters for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, to portraits of 400 saints for the Franciscans, to classic miniature paintings done in a 16th-century technique. His picture of a werewolf appeared in the movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." What became one of his most famous works showed a giant robot holding a dead man in his hand. It first appeared on the cover of the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Years later, two members of the rock group Queen asked Mr. Freas to reprise the image with band members in the robot's hand. In 1977 it appeared on the cover of Queen's album "News of the World," which contains the ubiquitous tune "We Will Rock You." Frank Kelly Freas, the son of two photographers, was born in Hornell, N.Y., on Aug. 27, 1922, and was raised in Canada. He was hooked on science fiction by the time he was 10. He flirted with medicine and engineering as possible occupations, but drifted toward art and attended classes at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. During World War II, he painted pulchritudinous women on the noses of bombers. An early job was painting internal organs for anatomy textbooks. His picture of a satyr on the cover of the November 1950 Weird Tales began 50 years of professional illustrating. His work appeared in magazines like Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and illustrated articles by writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. In an interview with Contemporary Authors, Mr. Freas said he regarded himself as an illustrator rather than an artist. "I prefer storytelling pictures and picture-generating stories," he said. The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called him "the most popular illustrator in the history of science fiction." Mr. Freas both wrote and illustrated several books, including "Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction" (Donning, 1977) and "Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star" (Greenswamp, 1985). Mr. Freas was married to the former Pauline H. Bussard from 1952 until her death in 1987. In addition to Laura, his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Jacqueline; his son, Jeremy; and six grandsons. His experience with Mad ended when Mr. Freas was turned down for a raise. He was also a little tired of painting the same grinning face. "Alfred E. Neuman was making me stale," he said in an interview in "The Mad World of William M. Gaines" by Frank Jacobs (Bantam, 1972). "I found it difficult to shift my artistic gears from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/arts/design/05freas.html From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 21:14:26 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:14:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F2EA.AE5D84D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <000201c4f36b$e1bc97e0$1503f604@S0027397558> Being up to date is important not only in medicine but in most jobs. The person who refuses to remain current is readying herself for the retirement pile. A twinge of gray or lots of it shouldn't be a determining factor but for surgical procedures, be it eye or capillary, I'd prefer someone with a steady hand. Gerry http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Personally, I would prefer someone with a twinge > of gray who is up to date on procedures :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 6:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jan 5 21:22:37 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:22:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F2EA.AE5D84D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <000d01c4f36c$af4c5790$1503f604@S0027397558> The worst thing a medical person or any professional can do is slack on keeping up to date. A twinge of gray or lots of it should not be a determining factor. Yet when it comes to either eye or capillary surgery, I need someone with a steady hand. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > Personally, I would prefer someone with a twinge > of gray who is up to date on procedures :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 6:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 23:22:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:22:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Susan Sontag Package No. 2 Message-ID: Susan Sontag Package No. 2 Deliver us from faraway evil http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/01/04/deliver_us_f rom_faraway_evil?mode=PF by Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 5.1.4 'Susan Sontag died," my mother murmured, not raising her head from the two-day-old Financial Times I had bought her in the hangarlike waiting room of Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. Just the day before, she heard a fellow tourist refer to the ''late" actor Jerry Orbach. ''He isn't dead, is he?" she asked me, and I had no idea. That evening, I snuck into the VIP enclave (''Servicio Real") of our hotel and snitched a day-old Miami Herald. Frazier Moore's Associated Press obituary confirmed that the gravel-voiced Orbach, now famous as detective Lennie Briscoe from ''Law & Order" reruns, had died at age 69. At 25, Orbach, an up-and-coming song-and-dance man who would later win a Tony award for his role in the musical ''Promises, Promises," starred in the original ''Fantasticks." Who knew? Oh, and 137,000 people died that same week in a tsunami in Southeast Asia. ''A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Just because the famous aphorism is attributed to Joseph Stalin doesn't mean it isn't true. It is a commonplace of the pulpit and the editorial page that we are all joined in one great brotherhood of man and woman, that ''each man's joy is joy to me, each man's grief is my own," to cite a popular hymn. But for many years I have wondered if that is true. I think compassion is like a radar signal that loses force the further it radiates from our hearts. I can easily understand why someone is more affected by the loss of a favorite actor, of a well-regarded talk-show host -- the circulating e-mail tributes to the late David Brudnoy are wonderfully articulate and emotional -- or by the death of an author one has enjoyed, than by the passing of tens of thousands of faraway strangers. In 1994, I remember seeing a picture of dozens of bodies washing over a waterfall during the Rwandan genocide, and reacting with shock and indifference. Those events seemed to be taking place in a galaxy far, far away. Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor. The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers' attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ''In India." I was in a remote hotel last week and tripped across a news report from Deutsche Welle, Germany's government-supported international network. With tens of thousands of Asians already confirmed dead, DW headlined the disappearance of four Germans in the tsunami. My immediate reaction was: Who cares about four Germans? Answer: The Germans care about the Germans. The Americans care about the Americans. And so on. Europeans and others sometimes dismiss America's ''overreaction" to the Sept. 11 attacks. Statistically speaking, the losses on 9/11 equaled those during a few hours of one of the European continent's epic land battles. But the impact was felt all over the Eastern seaboard, and all over the country. A man who lived a few houses down from me died on one of the airliners. Waiting in line to move my son's belongings into his college dorm in New York City a year later, I met several families from New Jersey for whom the memory of the year-old attacks remained painful and dramatic. They hadn't experienced an event, they had lived through a tragedy. When my family returned home from our vacation on Saturday, we were greeted by a handwritten note from a friend, saying she may have lung cancer. One of my sons burst out crying. Her biopsy was yesterday; as of this writing we don't know the results. For us, that's a tragedy. The rest is news. Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam at globe.com. ---------------------- ARMAVIRUMQUE: THE NEW CRITERION'S WEBLOG http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/2004_12_01_cano.html#1104279513716842 25 12.28.2004 Susan Sontag: a Prediction [Posted 6:17 PM by Roger Kimball] When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, "well, we'll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times." Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself for the Times's litany about 1) what a penetrating critical intelligence Sontag wielded and 2) what a "courageous" and challenging "dissident" voice she provided (those quotation marks are proleptic: let's see if the Times uses those words), here is another "courageous," "penetratingly intelligent" dissident voice, that of Salman Rushdie, who provided this bouquet in his capacity as President of the PEN American Center: Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles. She set a standard of intellectual rigor to which I and her many other admirers continue to aspire, insisting that with literary talent came an obligation to speak out on the great issues of the day, and above all to defend the sovereignty of the creative mind and imagination against every kind of tyranny. Those with strong stomachs can read all of Mr. Rusdie's encomium [106]here. There can be no doubt that Susan Sontag, the doyenne of (to use Tom Wolfe's apposite coinage) radical chic, commanded rare celebrity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Accordingly, her influence in those decades and beyond was great. The question is, was it a beneficent or a baneful influence? Sontag has been celebrated as a towering intellectual. In fact, though, what she offered were not so much arguments or insights as the simulacra of arguments and the mood or emotion of insights. I wrote at length about Sontag in my book [107]The Long March: How the Cultural Revoution of the 1960s Changed America. I draw upon that book and some other writings about her in what follows. Sontag burst upon the scene in the early 1960s with a handful of precious essays: "Notes on `Camp'" (1964) and "On Style" (1965) in Partisan Review, "Against Interpretation" (1964) in Evergreen Review; "One Culture and the New Sensibility" (1965), an abridged version of which first appeared in Mademoiselle; and several essays and reviews in the newly launched New York Review of Books Almost overnight these essays electrified intellectual debate and catapulted their author to celebrity. Not that Sontag's efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag's "Notes on `Camp'" was itself "only a piece of `camp.'" No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag's essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of "Against Interpretation," that "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"; her praise of camp, the "whole point" of which "is to dethrone the serious"; her encomium to the "new sensibility" of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, "have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent": in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere. Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn't matter, for example, that the whole notion of "an erotics of art" was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about "erotics" seems so much sexier than talking about "sex"; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere "interpretation"--which, Sontag had suggested, was these days "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling," "the revenge of the intellect upon art"--when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead? In "Susie Creamcheese Makes Love Not War," a devastating--and devastatingly funny--review of the Sontag oeuvre as of 1982, the critic Marvin Mudrick noted that Sontag was a critic whose every half-baked idea is a reject or thrift-shop markdown from the pastry cooks of post-World War II French intellectualism. . . . [W]hat matters [to her] isn't truth or sincerity or consistency or reality; what matters is "style" or getting away with it. Mudrick is especially good on Sontag's use of the word "exemplary": "Barthes's ideas have an exemplary coherence"; "Some lives are exemplary, others not"; Rimbaud and Duchamp made "exemplary renunciations" in giving up art for, respectively, gun-running and chess; "Silence exists as a decision--in the exemplary suicide of the artist . . ."; etc. Dilating on Sontag's effusions about silence--"the silence of eternity prepares for a thought beyond thought, which must appear from the perspective of traditional thinking . . . as no thought at all"--Mudrick usefully points out the similarity between Sontag and that other sage of silence, Kahlil Gibran: "Has silence or talk about it," Mudrick asks, "ever anywhere else been so very . . . exemplary?" Norman Podhoretz has suggested that the "rapidity" of Sontag's rise was due partly to her filling the role of "Dark Lady of American Letters," vacated when Mary McCarthy was "promoted to the more dignified status of Grande Dame as a reward for her years of brilliant service. The next Dark Lady would have to be, like her, clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing [New York-intellectual] family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness." The "ante on naughtiness," Podhoretz notes, had gone up since McCarthy's day: "in an era of what Sherry Abel has called the `fishnet bluestocking,' hints of perversion and orgies had to be there." In this context, it is worth noting that one of Sontag's characteristic productions was "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967), which appears in Styles of Radical Will (1969), her second collection of essays. In essence, it is a defense of pornography--though not, of course, as something merely salacious; Sontag doesn't champion pornography the way its usual clients do: for its content, for the lubricious stimulation it supplies. Instead, she champions pornography for its "formal" resources as a means of "transcendence." (The dancer and connoisseur of sodomy [108]Toni Bentley clearly has taken a page from Sontag on the issue of sex and transcendence.) It is hardly news that sexual ecstasy has often poached on religious rhetoric and vice versa; nor is it news that pornography often employs religious metaphors. That is part of its perversity--indeed its blasphemy. But Sontag decides to take pornography seriously as a solution to the spiritual desolations of modern secular culture. One of Sontag's great gifts has been her ability to enlist her politics in the service of her aestheticism. For her, it is the work of a moment to move from admiring pornography--or at least "the pornographic imagination"--to castigating American capitalism. Accordingly, toward the end of her essay she speaks of the traumatic failure of capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsession, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the person" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. "The Pornographic Imagination," like most of Sontag's essays, is full of powerful phrases, seductive insights, and extraordinary balderdash. Sontag dilates on pornography's "peculiar access to some truth." What she doesn't say is that The Story of O (for example) presents not an instance of mystical fulfillment but a graphic depiction of human degradation. Only someone who had allowed "form" to triumph over "content" could have ignored this. In a way, "The Pornographic Imagination" is itself the perfect camp gesture: for if camp aims to "dethrone the serious" it is also, as Sontag points out, "deadly serious" about the demotic and the trivial. Sontag is a master at both ploys. Having immersed herself in the rhetoric of traditional humanistic learning, she is expert at using it against itself. This of course is a large part of what has made her writing so successful among would-be "avant-garde" intellectuals: playing with the empty forms of traditional moral and aesthetic thought, she is able to appear simultaneously unsettling and edifying, daringly "beyond good and evil" and yet passionately engag?. In the long march through the institutions, Sontag has been an emissary of trivialization, deploying the tools of humanism to sabotage the humanistic enterprise. "The Pornographic Imagination" also exhibits the seductive Sontag hauteur in full flower. After telling us that pornography can be an exciting version of personal transcendence, she immediately remarks that "not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don't need `a wider scale of experience.' It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people." Not for you and me, Dear Reader: we are among the elect. We deserve that "wider scale of experience"; but as for the rest, as for "most people," well . . . As a writer, Sontag is essentially a coiner of epigrams. At their best they are witty, well phrased, provocative. A few are even true: "Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker but not a lover of the histrionic." But Sontag's striving for effect (unlike Nietzsche, she is a lover of the histrionic) regularly leads her into muddle. What, for example, can it mean to say that "the AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia" or that "risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism"? Nothing, really, although such statements do communicate an unperturbable aura of left-wing contempt for common sense. In "One Culture and the New Sensibility" Sontag enthusiastically reasons that "if art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes." But of course the idea that art is a "programming of the sensations" (a phrase, alas, of which Sontag is particularly fond) is wrong, incoherent, or both, as is the idea that feelings or sensations might be "given off" by any song or painting, even one by Rauschenberg (odors, yes; sensations, no). As often happens, her passion for synesthesia and effacing boundaries leads her into nonsense. And then there were Sontag's own political activities. Cuba and North Vietnam in 1968, China in 1973, Sarajevo in 1993 (where she went to direct a production of Waiting for Godot--surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time). Few people have managed to combine na?ve idealization of foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable effect. She has always talked like a political radical but lived like an aesthete. At the annual PEN writers' conference in 1986, Sontag declared that "the task of the writer is to promote dissidence." But it it turns out that, for her, only dissidence conducted against American interests counts. Consider the notorious essay she wrote about "the right way" for Americans to "love the Cuban revolution." Sontag begins with some ritualistic denunciations of American culture as "inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian." Item: "America is a cancerous society with a runaway rate of productivity that inundates the country with increasingly unnecessary commodities, services, gadgets, images, information." One of the few spots of light, she tells us, is Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, which teaches that "America's psychic survival entails her transformation through a political revolution." (It also teaches that, for blacks, rape can be a noble "insurrectionary act," a "defying and trampling on the white man's laws," but Sontag doesn't bother with that detail.) According to her, "the power structure derives its credibility, its legitimacy, its energies from the dehumanization of the individuals who operate it. The people staffing IBM and General Motors, and the Pentagon, and United Fruit are the living dead." Since the counterculture is not strong enough to overthrow IBM, the Pentagon, etc., it must opt for subversion. "Rock, grass, better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature--really grooving on anything--unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life." And here is where the Cubans come in: they enjoy this desirable "new sensibility" naturally, possessing as they do a "southern spontaneity which we feel our own too white, death-ridden culture denies us. . . . The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print culture." Indeed not: supine, desiccated creatures of a Communist tyranny would be more like it, though patronizing honky talk about "southern spontaneity" doubtless made things seem much better when this was written. In the great contest for writing the most fatuous line of political drivel, Sontag is always a contender. This essay contains at least two gems: after ten years, she writes, "the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization"; even better perhaps, is this passing remark delivered in parentheses: "No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published." Readers wishing to make a reality check should consult Paul Hollander's classic study Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, which cites Sontag's claim and then lists, in two or three pages, some of the many writers and artists who have been jailed, tortured, or executed by Castro's spontaneous gaiety. Sontag concocted a similar fairy tale when she went to Vietnam in 1968 courtesy of the North Vietnamese government. Her long essay "Trip to Hanoi" (1968) is another classic in the literature of political mendacity. Connoisseurs of the genre will especially savor Sontag's observation that the real problem for the North Vietnamese is that they "aren't good enough haters." Their fondness for Americans, she explains, keeps getting in the way of the war effort. They genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, "because they're bigger than we are," as a Vietnamese army officer told me, "and they're used to more meat than we are." People in North Vietnam really do believe in the goodness of man . . . and in the perennial possibility of rehabilitating the morally fallen. It would be interesting to know what Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war who was brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese, had to say about this little fantasia. Sontag acknowledges that her account tended somewhat to idealize North Vietnam; but that was only because she "found, through direct experience, North Vietnam to to be a place which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized." Unlike any country in Western Europe, you understand, and above all unlike the United States. "The Vietnamese are `whole' human beings, not `split' as we are." In 1967, shortly before her trip to Hanoi, Sontag had this to say about the United States: A small nation of handsome people . . . is being brutally and self-righteously slaughtered . . . by the richest and most grotesquely overarmed, most powerful country in the world. America has become a criminal, sinister country--swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world. In "What's Happening in America (1966)," Sontag tells readers that what America "deserves" is to have its wealth "taken away" by the Third World. In one particularly notorious passage, she writes that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history." What can one say? Sontag excoriates American capitalism for its "runaway rate of productivity." But she has had no scruples about enjoying the fruits of that productivity: a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1964, a Merrill Foundation grant in 1965, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1966, etc., etc., culminating in 1990 with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. Sontag preserved her radical chic credentials to the end. In the 1960s in was Vietnam and Cuba; in the 1990s it was Sarajevo. The one constant was unremitting animus against the United States: its culture, its politics, its economy, its very being. Following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, Sontag took to the pages of The New Yorker to explain that the assault of September 11 was "not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' [note the scare quotes] but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions. . . . [W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of [September 11's] slaughter, they were not cowards." Does she say, then, that they were murderous fanatics? Hardly. Sontag is at once too ambivalent and too admiring for that: too ambivalent about the "world's self-proclaimed superpower" and too admiring of the murderous Muslim fanatics. Sontag enjoyed an extraordinary career. But, pace Salman Rushdie, her celebrity was not the gratifying product of intellectual distinction but the tawdry coefficient of a lifelong devotion to the mendacious and disfiguring imperatives of radical chic. 106. http://www.pen.org/sontag.html 107. http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/longmarch.htm 108. http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/dec04/bentley.htm --------------------- Susan Sontag - Remembering an intellectual heroine. By Christopher Hitchens http://slate.msn.com/id/2111506/ Posted Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2004, at 8:37 AM PT Between the word "public" and the word "intellectual" there falls, or ought to fall, a shadow. The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the secret message in the prison diaries. Individual pleasure of this kind is only rivaled when the same reader turns into a writer, and after a long wrestle until daybreak hits on his or her own version of the mot juste, or the unmasking of pretension, or the apt, latent literary connection, or the satire upon tyranny. The 20^th century was perhaps unusual in the ways in which it forced such people to quit their desks and their bookshelves and to enter the agora. Looking over our shoulders, we do not find that we have much respect or admiration for those who simply survived, or who kept the private life alive. We may owe such people more than we know, but it is difficult to view them as exemplary. Our heroes and heroines are those who managed, from Orwell through Camus and Solzhenitsyn, to be both intellectual and engaged. (This combination of qualities would also be true of a good number of our fools and villains, from Celine to Shaw, with Sartre perhaps occupying the middle position.) Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impressed by the marvelous people she had read--beginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borgesian library that was her one prized possession--that she was almost shy about offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you will see that she was not at all prolific. If it doesn't seem like that--if it seems as if she was always somewhere in print--it is because she timed her interventions very deftly. By the middle 1960s, someone was surely going to say something worth noticing about the energy and vitality of American popular culture. And it probably wasn't going to be any of the graying manes of the old Partisan Review gang. Sontag's sprightly, sympathetic essays on the diminishing returns of "high culture" were written by someone who nonetheless had a sense of tradition and who took that high culture seriously (and who was smart enough to be published in Partisan Review). Her acute appreciation of the importance of photography is something that now seems uncontroversial (the sure sign of the authentic pioneer), and her "Notes on 'Camp' " were dedicated to the memory of Oscar Wilde, whose fusion of the serious and the subversive was always an inspiration to her, as it is, I can't resist adding, to too few female writers. In a somewhat parochial time, furthermore, she was an internationalist. I once heard her rather sourly described as American culture's "official greeter," for her role in presenting and introducing the writers of other scenes and societies. There was no shame in that charge: She--and Philip Roth--did a very great deal to familiarize Americans with the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera and Gy?rgy Konr?d. In Against Interpretation, published in 1966, she saw more clearly than most that the future defeat of official Communism was inscribed in its negation of literature. When Arpad Goncz, the novelist who eventually became a post-Communist president of Hungary, was invited to the White House, he requested that Susan be placed on his guest list. It's hard to think of any other American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be this week, from Berlin to Prague to Sarajevo. (Updated, Dec. 31: On Thursday, Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic of Sarajevo announced that the city will name a street after her, and the city's Youth Theater said that it would mount a plaque for her on its wall.) Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did. Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others. She had a long running battle with successive tumors and sarcomas and was always in the front line for any daring new treatment. Her books on illness and fatalism, and her stout refusal to accept defeat, were an inspiration. So were the many anonymous hours and days she spent in encouraging and advising fellow sufferers. But best of all, I felt, was the moment when, as president of American PEN, she had to confront the Rushdie affair in 1989. It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist, was a warning of the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of the usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as were the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and sought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of solidarity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember her saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think about Salman every second. It's as if he was a lover." I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed. With that signature black-on-white swoosh in her hair, and her charismatic and hard-traveling style, she achieved something else worthy of note--the status of celebrity without any of the attendant tedium and squalor. She resolutely declined to say anything about her private life or to indulge those who wanted to speculate. The nearest to an indiscretion she ever came was an allusion to Middlemarch in the opening of her 1999 novel In America, where she seems to say that her one and only marriage was a mistake because she swiftly realized "not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon.") A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral oration. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, which condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Could Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She most certainly could. She said and did her own share of foolish things during the 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" being a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I thought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept. 11, 2001, as the one thing it most obviously was not: "a consequence of specific [sic] American alliances and actions." Even the word "general" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know better. She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to have her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read. But even this insecurity had its affirmative side. If she was sometimes a little permissive, launching a trial balloon only to deflate it later (as with her change of heart on the filmic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl) this promiscuity was founded in curiosity and liveliness. About 20 years ago, I watched her having an on-stage discussion with Umberto Eco in downtown New York. Eco was a bit galumphing--he declared that his favorite novel was Lolita because he could picture himself in the part of Umberto Umberto. Susan, pressed to define the word "polymath," was both sweet and solemn. "To be a polymath," she declared, "is to be interested in everything--and in nothing else." She was always trying to do too much and square the circle: to stay up late debating and discussing and have the last word, then get a really early night, then stay up reading, and then make an early start. She adored trying new restaurants and new dishes. She couldn't stand affectless or bored or cynical people, of any age. She only ventured into full-length fiction when she was almost 60, and then discovered that she had a whole new life. And she resisted the last malady with terrific force and resource, so that to describe her as life-affirming now seems to me suddenly weak. Anyway--death be not proud. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is [30]Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of [31]A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of [32]Blood, Class and Empire. -------------- Susan Sontag (1933-2004): Remembering the voice of moral responsibilityand unembarrassed hedonism http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=59762&page=indiana &issue=0501&printcde=MzMxNDgxNzMzNg==&refpage=L25ld3MvMDUwMSxpbmRpYW5hLD U5NzYyLDIuaHRtbA== by Gary Indiana 5.1.4 Like Maria Callas's voice, Susan Sontag's mind, to borrow a phrase from the great filmmaker Werner Schroeter (one of countless underappreciated artists Sontag championed), was "a comet passing once in a hundred years." In a dauntingly, often viciously anti-intellectual society, Sontag made being an intellectual attractive. She was the indispensible voice of moral responsibility, perceptual clarity, passionate (and passionately reasonable) advocacy: for aesthetic pleasure, for social justice, for unembarrassed hedonism, for life against death. Sontag took it as a given that our duty as sentient beings is to rescue the world. She knew that empathy can change history. She set the bar of skepticism as high as it would go. Allergic to received ideas and their hypnotic blandishments, she was often startled to discover how devalued the ethical sense, and the courage to exercise it, had become in American consumer culture. Sontag had impeccable instincts for saying and doing what needed to be said and done while too many others scrambled for the safety of consensus. Hence the uproar when she declared, at the height of Solidarity's epochal crisis in 1982, that "communism . . . is fascism with a human face." Hence also the depressingly rote indignation mobilized against her response to a New Yorker survey about the 9-11 attacks, published on September 24, 2001a survey that most respondents used to promote themselves, their latest books, the depth of their own "feelings." Of course it was, and still is, easier for many Americans to pretend the events of 9-11 were inexplicable eruptions of violence against American virtuousness, perpetrated by people who "hate us for our freedoms." Indeed, the habitual assertion of the American way of life's superiority is probably what persuades supposedly serious writers to weigh in on a civil catastrophe by promoting their own narrow interests, dropping in news of their current travel itineraries, their marriages, their kidsoh, and how shaken they were by the tragic events. It takes unusual bravery to cite, in a large media venue, cause and effect as operant elements in a man-made emergencyespecially when the programmed pieties and entrenched denial mechanisms of society run in the opposite direction. Sontag drew her own better-than-well-informed conclusions about what happened on 9-11. The habit of independent thought has so little currency in 21st-century America that dissent is the last thing most Americans consider worth protecting. What Jean Genet referred to as "the far Right and its imbecilic mythology" have already been activated in several "obituary" pieces, including one fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag's entire lifework. It's lowering to realize how terminally bitter the American right really is: Even in its current triumphal micro-epoch, it needs to demonize somebody. Sontag's political "lapses," cited even in sympathetic articles, are in fact the public moments one should most admire her for. She was usually right, and when she hadn't been, she said so. It's customary these days to damn people for "inconsistency," as if it's somehow virtuous to persist forever in being wrong. Sontag interrogated her own ideas with merciless rigor, and when she discovered they no longer applied, or were defectively inadequate or just plain bad, she never hesitated to change her mind in public. Certainly she felt the same revulsion and horror at the atrocity of 9-11 that any New Yorker, any citizen of the world, did. But she also had the moral scruple to connect the attacks to generally untelevised, lethal American actions abroad, to the indiscriminate carnage that has typified both state policy and terrorist violence in the new century. Where, exactly, does the difference lie? Unlike our government's loudest warmongers and their media cheerleaders, Sontag put her own life on the line, many times, in defense of her principlesin Israel during the Six Day War, in Hanoi during the American bombardment, in Sarajevo throughout much of the conflict there. Like Genet, she was willing to go anywhere, at a moment's notice, out of solidarity with people on the receiving end of contemporary barbarism. The range of her talents and interests was no less impressive than her moral instincts. She once told me that "every good book is worth reading at least once" (in her case, it was usually at least twice). Her appetite for cultural provenderopera, avant-garde theater, film, dance, travel, historical inquiry, cuisine of any kind, architecture, the history of ideaswas inexhaustible. If you told her about something she didn't know, she soon knew more about it than you did. She routinely went directly from a museum to a screening, then to a concert; and if there was a kung fu movie playing somewhere after all that, off she went, whether you were still ambulatory or not. I know I'm in a minority, but I remain a fan of Sontag's early novels The Benefactor and Death KitSontag herself cared little for them in later years. Not enough people have seen the films she directed: Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl in Sweden, Promised Lands in Israel, Unguided Tour in Venice. These early and middle works could be considered noble experiments, operating on a high level of fluency and daring. None of these works are as sumptuously realized as her best essays, or her later novels The Volcano Lover and In America. At times, her reverence for the European modernists who influenced her eclipses her own seldom mentioned, American gift for absurdist black humor. (Death Kit has anything but a reputation for hilarity, but it's one of the most darkly funny narratives written in America during the Vietnam War.) Many of Sontag's essays, for that matter, have threads of Firbankian whimsy and manic satire running through themand no, I'm not referring to "Notes on Camp." There's no way to summarize her restless cultural itinerary and her immense services to "the republic of letters" in the space of an obituary. What I can speak of, here, again, is the indelible example she set as a moral being, citizen, and writer. She sedulously distinguished between the merely personal and the insights personal experience generated. "I" appears less frequently in her writings than in those of any other significant American writer I can think of. If Sontag was less averse, in recent times, to saying "I," it could be that she at last realized she'd earned the authority for "I" to mean more, coming from her, than it does coming from most people. (In America, "I" isn't simply a pronoun, but a way of life.) It's my guess that growing up in Arizona and Southern California, among people who placed no special value on intelligence and none at all on its cultivation, Sontag's first line of defense against being hurt by other people was the same thing (aside from physical beauty) that distinguished her from ordinary peoplethat awesome intellect. She could be ferociously assertive, and at times even hurtful, without at all realizing the tremendous effect she had on people. In some ways, like any American intellectual, she often felt slighted or underappreciated, even when people were actually paying keen attention to her. Her personal magnetism was legendary. Even in later times, she had the glamour of a film star. She almost never wore makeup (though she did, finally, find a shade of lipstick she could stand), and usually wore black slacks, black sweaters, and sometimes a black leather jacket, though occasionally the jacket would be brown. She had the body language of a young person: She once explained to me that people get old when they started acting like old people. I never heard her say a dumb word, even in moments of evident distress. She did, from time to time, do things that seemed quite odd, but then, who doesn't? Her will to keep experiencing, learning, and feeling "the old emotions"and, sometimes, to make herself empty, restock her interiority, break with old ideascame with a project of self-transcendence that Sontag shouldered, like Sisyphus's stone, cheerfully, "with fervor." She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of her struggles with cancer, that she didn't find her own illness interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of ideas, which her illness certainly didbut she communicated them in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn't be. (To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not only feelingthough the two are inseparable.) In light of her own illness, she set about removing the stigma then attached to cancer, dismantling the punitive myths this fearsome illness generated at the time. We don't look at illness in the same way we did before Illness as Metaphor and the widespread examination of our relationship to medicine that it triggered. Her detachment in this regard was a powerful asset. Many years ago, I went with her one morning to her radiologist. The radiologist had gotten back some complicated X-rays and wanted to discuss them. On the way uptown, Susan was incredibly composed, long resigned to hyper-vigilance as the price of staying alive. At the clinic, she disappeared into the doctor's office for a worryingly long time. When she came out, finally, she was laughing. "She put the X-rays up," Susan told me, "and said, 'This really doesn't look good.' So I looked them over, and thought about it. Then I said, 'You're right. These don't look good. But you know something, these aren't my X-rays.' " They weren't her X-rays. Her most recent procedure had left a temporary, subcutaneous line of staple sutures running from her throat to her abdomen. The tiny metal clamps she knew were there would have glowed on an X-ray. For some reason this was the first memory that flashed to mind when the sad news came that she was gone. ----------- Notes on Camp Sontag http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage6.asp 5.1.10 by Sheelah Kolhatkar "I can remember going to some very, very high-powered and glamorous parties, with her or because of her, at, say, Roger Straus," recalled the writer Stephen Koch, who became friends with Susan Sontag in 1965, when she was in her early 30s. "And you would walk in, and it was wall-to-wall Nobel Prize winners and Mikhail Baryshnikov and George Balanchine and Richard Avedon it was like walking into a Hirschfeld cartoon. And she flourished there. She was Susan Sontag, and it was just part of that. There was a certain high-gloss celebrity thing she would occasionally do." Indeed, there were many other things that Sontag did in addition to being a glamorous intellectual superstara role she played well until her death last week of leukemia at age 71. She wrote books, both provocative essays and novels; read some of the 15,000 volumes of fiction and philosophy she said were stashed in her Chelsea apartment; traveled to war-torn countries; attended the ballet; and obsessively watched films. She created ideological enemies as swiftly as she did allies. But perhaps its the 1975 black-and-white photograph, taken by her friend, Peter Hujarof her reclining on a bed, staring off into the middle distance, perhaps contemplating Artaudthat most captures how we like to remember her: young, sultry, brilliant, precocious. It was the 1960s that, in many ways, Susan Sontag represented besta time in America when it was fun to be an intellectual, when the worlds of high and low culture were converging and it was cool to be provocatively outspoken, intimidatingly well-read, the smartest one at the party. Perhaps she made it so. After all, as her friend, Mr. Koch, and countless others since her death have observed, Sontag was more than a witty, attractive brain. She was a starsomething that has much to do with the intellectual climate of the 60s, but mostly to do with Sontag herself. "For one, she was glamorous-looking. One ought not to ignore that, as if it had nothing to do with Susans celebrity," said Robert Boyers, a professor at Skidmore College and the editor of the literary journal Salmagundi, who got to know Sontag in the late 1960s and became friends with her in the 70s. "Susan knew that she was very beautiful and very photogenic, and she always liked to have her photograph taken by first-rate photographers. "I remember the first time in the 70s," he continued, "when I went to a poster shop in Paris, and I saw all these racks of postcards of movie stars, and was astonished to see the numbers of postcard images of Susan Sontag on those racks. There was Grace Kelly, and Susan Sontag." "Somehow in the 60s, she had become an icon, like Twiggy or something," said Jim Miller, the chair of the liberal-studies program at the New School, who occasionally crossed paths with Sontag and who looked up to her as a student in the 60s. "Thats what made it unusual. You know, in France, intellectuals are celebrities all the time. In America, its quite unusual but not unheard of. You know, you get a hot chick at a party full of frumpy professors and people go, Whoa!" Although Sontag was schooled in the 1950s, first at the rigorous mental training ground that was the University of Chicago and later at Harvard, with sojourns to Oxford and the Sorbonne, she produced the work that would make her known in the 1960s. She moved to New York, the city of her birth, on Jan. 1, 1959, freshly divorced and with a young son, and into a tiny apartment on West End Avenue. She taught in the religion department at Columbia University and contributed to publications like the Partisan Review; the essay "Notes on Camp," which sparked her notoriety, was published there in 1964. She was absorbed into the fold of Farrar, Straus (later "and Giroux"), which would become her lifelong publishing house, in 1961, when she signed a contract for her first novel, The Benefactor. Her essay collection, Against Interpretation, was published in 1966. It was a moment when the division between elite culture and mass culture was quickly collapsing, and Sontag was a primary figure in both causing and explaining it; her "Notes on Camp" addressed gay popular culture through an academic lens, and was permission for the cultural elite to delve into "lowbrow" fields such as film and rock criticism. "Being an intellectual used to mean, until the mid-1960s, attempting in ones work and ones posture to uphold that distinction between high and low, and basically to resist the efforts to erode it, whereas in the 60s it came to seem impossible to do that any longer," said Mr. Boyers. "The 1960s was a time in which many intellectuals, who had largely been absorbed in their own work and in finding niches in the academy, suddenly felt called upon to take positions and put themselves on the line." Sontag had a sharp sense of what was about to prove riveting to the types of people she viewed as her peersputting herself at the front edge of trends, or at least capitalizing effectively on what was already happening. (She could explain Jean-Luc Godard movies to people who were going to see them but still hadnt a clue what they were.) Mr. Koch first came to know Ms. Sontag in 1965, when he was 24 and she about 32, after he reviewed The Benefactor in the Antioch Review and sent her a copy. The two struck up a friendship over a Chinese dinner around 114th Street and Broadway. "I even remember what we ate: smoked fish," recalled Mr. Koch. "She was wearing a car coat. She was very friendly. I was filled with ideas of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to publish, and she said, Oh, dont publish there. Ill show you where to publish." She was a worthwhile ally to cultivate. Sontag led Mr. Koch around town, introducing him to Richard Kluger, then the books editor at the New York Herald Tribune, and to the literary editor at The Nation. She read his manuscripts and introduced him to editors, taking him under her wing, as she is known to have done for many (mostly male) young thinkers throughout her career. He visited her apartment, then a tiny two-bedroom she shared with her son David, with a living room lined with framed movie stills. "She was very girlish, smiled a lot, and had a very radiant glow," said Mr. Koch. "She understood about how she was becoming famous. It was extremely interesting to watch," he continued. "She once said, I was at a screening of a movie last night, and a lot of people were interested in the fact that I was there. It bothered her. But on the whole, she carried herself with her gathering celebrity very well. The talent for being famous, Hemingway had to a world-class degree. Susan had it to a remarkable degree. She had an innate talent for being well-known. People say, Oh, well, she went after celebrity. She was a natural celebrityit came to her like breathing in and breathing out." "She was a very young, beautiful woman," recalled the poet Richard Howard, a close friend of Sontags who sometimes accompanied her to literary salons and occasionally baby-sat her sonwhen she wasnt bringing the youngster along with her to parties and readings. "She went out a lot and saw a lot of people and stayed up late. She was interested in everything that people did late at night. She was open to almost anything. She was a very exciting and open friend, very frank and direct. She was around; she was everywhere." Sontag was often compared to Mary McCarthy, the reigning smart-girl-about-town of her day, which didnt necessarily thrill her. "Mary McCarthy once told Susan, I hear youre the new me," said Morris Dickstein, a professor of literature and film at the CUNY graduate school, who sat in on some classes with Sontag while an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1960s. "Mary McCarthy was then the reigning woman intellectual. Its absurd to think there had to be only one woman intellectual, but its clear that Camille Paglia had that same All About Eve feeling toward Susan Sontag that Susan Sontag had toward Mary McCarthy. Of course theres room for more than one, but somehow there was this idea that there had to be only one star with a kind of queen-bee quality. I guess its men who created that feelingthat there has to be this one mesmerizing woman who combines brains and beauty, intellect and sensuality." Still, friends maintain that whether or not Sontag sought fame, most of it, from the glamour to the intellectual prowess, came naturally to her. Mr. Koch described her as an "innate highbrow." "She was someone looking up to the greats," said Mr. Koch. "She wasnt trying to be like Mary McCarthy. She was trying to be like Gide. She was trying to be like Henry James. Not in imitating their work, but moving toward what she would call seriousness." Ms. Paglia, a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said that despite their famous disagreements (and Ms. Paglias repeated dissing of her predecessors work in print), she looked up to Sontag. "When I was young, I was looking for role models for a life as a thinking woman," said Ms. Paglia. "She was a rigorous female thinker at a time when careers for women were not encouraged at all. Our self-conception is parallel. This is an American model of a woman intellectual who is not afraid of pop culture, who is not afraid of the media. That is what I admire about her in the 1960s." You may reach Sheelah Kolhatkar via email at: [9]skolhatkar at observer.com. From checker at panix.com Wed Jan 5 23:23:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:23:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Message-ID: Where Was God During the Tsunami? [There follows the Wikipedia article on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Socially, it was the most important earthquake in history, with the possible exception of the alleged earthquake that destroyed the alleged Atlantis, since the Lisbon earthquake lead to widespread doubts about the goodness of the Creator if not his existence. [The Plague also had by far the most important social impact in Europe, though it killed the same third of the population in China and India as it did in Europe. In Europe, the medieval theological fiction of the "just price" came to differ not greatly from the market price over the decades. But after the plague struck, the labor supply was so diminished that its price should have gone way up. The fiction of "finding the law" in eternal principles like the "just price" ceased to be viable. Common law, the accretion of judicial decisions, allowed the fiction to be maintained. If the principles say this happens in case A and that happens in case B, a judge would decide what happens in case A 1/2. The judge would not make law; he would find law by filling it in. A major overhaul of the law, called a statute, was very rare, though there was some movement in that direction with, say, the Second Statute of Westminster of 12. (Exactly why the First Statute was not a true statute, I am not sure.) [Anyhow, after the Black Death, one of the first statutes was the Statute of Laborers, which (futilely) tried to prevent the price of labor from rising. The trend to the deliberate creation of law, and thus a new concept of law, really got going as the result of the Black Death. By 1776 in a world changed, not by another plague, but by the experience of 193 years of having to deal with changed circumstances (dating from Roanoke Island), Mr. Jefferson could speak of "the Right of the People to ... institute new Government, laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." [In China and India, the Plague caused no such upheaval from law as eternal to (ultimately) law as fostering happiness, and no earthquake outside of Europe triggered such a widespread questioning of religion. [Why?] Guardian: How can religious people explain something like this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1380094,00.html How can religious people explain something like this? Earthquakes led 18th-century thinkers to ask questions we shy away from Martin Kettle Tuesday December 28, 2004 The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it is. Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most of us realised. An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to religion. A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied. We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes." Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic terms. There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen? As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least wholly coherent. The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia. But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours sometimes prefers to think. For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens. Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes. Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself. Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world. Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life? From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things? [42]martin.kettle at guardian.co.uk -------------- To God, an age-old question The Telegraph - Calcutta : International http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041231/asp/foreign/story_4195540.asp A woman gestures as she cries on a street of Nagapattinam, some 350 km south of Chennai. (AFP) London, Dec. 30 (Reuters): It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history. It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern Indias Tamil Nadu. Why did you do this to us, God? she wailed. What did we do to upset you? Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the worlds great religions with such a basic test of faith as this weeks tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews. In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people? Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of gods plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins. This is an expression of Gods great ire with the world, Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said. Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhis Birla temple said the disaster was caused by a huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth and driven by the positions of the planets. Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysias Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that he created the world and can destroy the world. Many faiths believe disasters foretell the end of time or the coming of a Messiah. Some Christians expect chaos and destruction as foretold in the Bibles final book, Revelations. Maria, a 32-year-old Jehovahs Witness in Cyprus who believes that the apocalypse is coming said people who once slammed the door in her face were stopping to listen. It is a sign of the last days, she said. But for others, such calamities can prompt a repudiation of faith. Secularist Martin Kettle wrote in Britains Guardian newspaper that the tsunamis should force people to ask if the God can exist that can do such things? or if there is no God, just nature. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike, he wrote. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. It is a question that clergy have to deal with nearly every day, not just at times of great catastrophe but when providing consolation for the daily sorrows of life, said US Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon. It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children, he said. In one modern view, he said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. This is not something that God has done. The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isnt Why did God do this to us? but How do we human beings care for one another? ---------------------- Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Waves-of-destruction-wash-away-belief -in-Gods-benevolence/2004/12/29/1103996611542.html Sydney Morning Herald December 30, 2004 Compassion is the best response when humanity faces the problem of evil, writes Edward Spence. "Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened when the tsunami unleashed its terror. So we seek answers where answers are hard to come by, in either secular or sacred realms. Traditionally, the Judeo-Christian God, considered the most supreme and perfect being in the universe, has been ascribed the following necessary attributes: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipresence (present everywhere at all times and at once), omnipotence (almighty and powerful) and benevolence (all good and caring). How, then, did a God as powerful and benevolent as this allow such a thing to happen? If he is benevolent then he cannot also be omnipotent, for a God who has both these attributes would have wanted to, cared to and been able to prevent such a catastrophe. Perhaps, though omnipotent, He is not benevolent. That might explain why, although it was within His power to stop the tsunami, He simply chose not to: God has His own reasons and we are not to ask why. However, this answer will not suffice since by definition God is perfect. Being perfect, He must of necessity not merely be omnipotent but benevolent as well. A possible solution to this problem, traditionally known as the problem of evil, was offered by the heretical Manicheans, who believed not in one supreme being but two: one good God responsible for all the good things in life and another bad God, Satan, responsible for all the evil in the world. St Augustine, a follower in his early 20s, became an ardent critic of this doctrine, thinking a weak God powerless to defeat Satan was not worth worshipping. Philosophically, if God is perfect, then there can be only one perfect God, not two. In any case, evil is an imperfection and thus not a characteristic that can be attributed to God. If the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are at play and the deaths caused by the tsunami are a cosmic payback in the form of karma, does that offer a solution, albeit a philosophical one, to the problem of evil? I think not. For how can children, some as young as a few months, who had not yet lived their lives, deserve to be punished so cruelly for their past sins - especially when they have not been offered the promised divine opportunity to atone for those sins through another life? Even if solutions are forthcoming to these philosophical conundrums, humanely speaking they make little sense. Perhaps that is why some people remain sceptical about the presence of any divine providence ruling over us. A compromise solution, between secular scepticism and a psychological need for the sacred, was offered by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Although believing in gods, he claimed these divine beings would not want to diminish their heavenly happiness by mingling in the sordid affairs of mortals. For Epicurus, the gods were not crazy but simply indifferent to both human joys and sorrows. When it comes to social or natural evils, we are all alone. But if natural disasters are merely random events caused by the uncaring and blind forces of nature, does this offer us any comfort or meaning in the face of the apocalyptic events on Boxing Day? Even if our heads offer us such solutions, our hearts refuse to follow. For the problem of evil is an existential problem that confronts our own individual mortality and vulnerability to unknown and unexpected disasters. Ultimately, heartfelt tears shed in earnest and with compassion, with offerings of charity for those who have suffered, are more meaningful than any theological and philosophical treatise on the problem of evil. Especially at Christmas when, according to the gospels, love is the single core message. Perhaps this is the essence, if the legend is true, of what God learnt from us when He walked and suffered as a man among us. Ultimately, the problem of evil confronts us not as a puzzle to be solved but as a mystery to be experienced. And as Jesus and Plato before him indicated, the meaning of the mystery of life can be found only by experiencing another great mystery - the mystery of love. Dr Edward Spence is a philosopher at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University. -------------------- Tremors of Doubt: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami? http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097 BY DAVID B. HART Wall St. Journal. Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa. Voltaire's "Po?me sur le d?sastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"? Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity. Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained. As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God. The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature. Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light. When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days. Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans). ------------------ CHE: The Cultural and Historical Significance of the Tsunami Disaster The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02602.htm By DAVID GLENN The terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired poems, novels, and decades of theological debate. The Managua earthquake of 1972 is widely believed to have hastened the end of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's regime in Nicaragua. (Somoza diverted international relief aid into private bank accounts; citizens were not amused.) Last month's Indian Ocean tsunamis will almost certainly have long-term repercussions of their own. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a professor of earth science at Wesleyan University, explores the aftermath of trauma in his new book, Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions (Princeton University Press), which he wrote with Donald Theodore Sanders, a freelance science writer. Q. You were born in Indonesia. Based on your studies of other earthquakes worldwide, how do you think this new disaster will shape the country's future? A. Events don't just stop short. The present situation that we have in Sumatra is very indicative of that. We are now terribly concerned about possibly as many as 100,000 people who might have died there. But we should also think about those who survived. There are many people who have settled along the coast to serve tourists...and have been able to invest, let's say, first in a bike, then a small motorbike, then maybe a small Toyota. And they were coming up in life from the lowermost poverty levels. Now, suddenly, within a few minutes, in an hour, all that is gone....It will take at least a decade for those people to reconstruct their lives. Q. In your book, you point out that after almost every major historical earthquake, people have argued that divine retribution was at work. A. Many people in Indonesia are well educated enough by now to no longer really believe in that. But there is still a strong religious undercurrent. So I'm very sure that a number of people there do believe that this is some kind of a punishment....That kind of fear will continue as long as there are aftershocks. And we know that after an earthquake like this, we'll have aftershocks for at least a year. So during this period, of course, people will go to churches and mosques and pray for liberation from continuing punishment, not realizing that this is a natural phenomenon that cannot be handled by whoever is upstairs. Q. It took weeks for people in the American colonies to learn about the Lisbon earthquake. Images of last week's tsunamis were transmitted immediately. A. It may mean that we also forget more quickly. We now see this, and we think, How terrible and how incredible, and We'll have to send some money. But like everything else in this world, things are going faster. So maybe in another month, other difficulties will attract the headlines. That's the kind of thing that I always find the most unfortunate. Over time I think we have become more shallow. -------------------- 1755 Lisbon earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake 1755 Lisbon earthquake According to Paul Kiernan, expert of Lisbon history and Partner at the H&K law firm in Washington DC, the 1755 [5]Lisbon earthquake took place on [6]November 1, [7]1755 at 9:20 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly [8]earthquakes in history, killing over 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a [9]tsunami and fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon. The quake had a strong impact on [10]18th century society, including accelerating a political conflict in [11]Portugal and being the subject of the first scientific study of an earthquake's effect over a large area. Modern [12]geologists estimate that the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the [13]Richter scale. Contents [14]1 The earthquake [15]2 The day after [16]3 Social implications [17]4 The birth of seismology [18]5 External link [[19]edit] The earthquake Missing image Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg The [20]ruins of the Carmo convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake The earthquake struck in early morning of November 1, the [21]All Saints Day [22]Catholic holiday. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half to six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip apart the city centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing the sea floor, littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Tens of minutes later an enormous [23]tsunami engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days. Lisbon was not the only [24]Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. All the south of the country, namely the [25]Algarve, was affected and destruction was generalized. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout [26]Europe and [27]North Africa. Tsunamis up to twenty meters in height swept the coast from North Africa to [28]Finland and across the [29]Atlantic to [30]Martinique and [31]Barbados. Of a population of 275,000, about 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed across the [32]Mediterranean in [33]Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including its famous palaces and libraries. Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before, was burned to the ground. The Royal Palace stood just beside the [34]Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Pa?o, and was destroyed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume library and hundreds of works of art, including paintings by [35]Titian, [36]Rubens, and [37]Correggio, were lost. The precious royal archives concerning the exploration of the Atlantic and old documents also disappeared. The earthquake also destroyed the major churches of Lisbon, namely the [38]Cathedral of Santa Maria, and the [39]Basilicas of S?o Paulo, Santa Catarina, S?o Vincente de Fora, and the Misericordia. The ruins of the Carmo convent can still be visited today in the centre of the city. The Royal Hospital of All-Saints was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. [[40]edit] The day after Due to a stroke of luck, the royal family escaped unharmed from the catastrophe. King [41]Joseph I of Portugal and the court had left the city, after attending mass at sunrise. The reason was the will of one of the princesses to have a holy day away from the city. The king was very fond of his four daughters and decided to oblige her wishes. After the catastrophe, Joseph I developed a fear of living within walls, and the court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda, then in the outskirts of Lisbon. Like the king, the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo (the [42]Marquis of Pombal) survived the earthquake. With the pragmatism that characterized his rule, the prime minister immediately started to organize the reconstruction. He was not paralysed with shock and is reported to have answered: Now? We bury the dead and take care of the living. His quick response put fire-fighters in the city to extinguish the flames, and sent in teams to remove the thousands of corpses, quelling fears that corpses would lead to an epidemic. As for the city itself, the prime minister and the king hired architects and engineers and less than a year later, Lisbon was already free from the debris and being reconstructed. The king was keen to have a new, perfectly ordained city. Big squares and rectilinear, large avenues were the mottos of the new Lisbon. At the time, somebody asked the Marquis of Pombal what was the need of such wide streets. The Marquis answered: one day they will be small... And indeed, the chaotic traffic of Lisbon reflects the wisdom of the reply. The new downtown, known nowadays as the Pombaline Downtown, is one of Lisbon's attractions. These buildings are also among the first seismic protected constructions in the world. Small wooden models were built for testing and the earthquake was simulated by marching troops around them. [[43]edit] Social implications The earthquake shook a lot more than a city and its buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelisation of the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed every important church. For the religious minds of the 18th century, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain. In the following days, priests roamed the city hanging people suspected of heresy on sight, blaming them for the disaster. Many contemporary writers, such as [44]Voltaire, mentioned the earthquake on their writings. The Lisbon earthquake made many people wonder about the existence of a God who permitted these events to happen. In the internal politics, the earthquake was also devastating. The prime minister was the favourite of the king, but the high nobility despised him as an upstart. The feelings were returned and a constant struggle for power and royal favour was taking place. After November 1, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal severed the power of the aristocratic faction. Conflicts were constant and silent opposition to King Joseph I started to rise. This would end in an attempted murder of the king and the elimination of the powerful Tavora family. See [45]Tavora affair for the whole account. [[46]edit] The birth of [47]seismology The competent action of the prime minister was not limited to the practicalities of the reconstruction. The Marquis ordered a query to be sent to all [48]parishes of the country, regarding the earthquake and its effects. Questions included: * how long did the earthquake last? * how many aftershocks were felt? * what kind of damage was caused? * did animals behave strangely? (this question may sound strange but it anticipated studies by [49]Chinese seismologists in the 1960s) * what happened in the water holes? and many others. The answers are still archived in the Tower of Tombo, the national historical archive. Studying and cross-referencing the priests' accounts, modern scientists were able to reconstruct the event in a scientific perspective. Without the query designed by the [50]Marquis of Pombal, the first attempt of a seismological, objective description, this would be impossible. This is why the Marquis is regarded as the precursor of seismological sciences. The [51]geological causes of this earthquake and the seismic activity in the region of Lisbon are still being discussed by modern scientists. Since Lisbon is located in a centre of a [52]tectonic plate, there are no obvious reasons for the event. Portuguese geologists have suggested that the earthquake is related with the first steps of development of an [53]Atlantic [54]subduction zone. Note: Despite the fact that the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo is mentioned here as [55]Marquis of Pombal, the title was only granted in [56]1770. See also: [57]List of earthquakes [[58]edit] External link * [59]Historical Depictions of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/) References 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologist 13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_earthquake 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_day_after 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#Social_implications 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_birth_of_seismol ogy 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#External_link 19. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=1 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins 21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints_Day 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algarve 26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa 28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland 29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinique 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados 32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_sea 33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco 34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus 35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubens 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_da_Correggio 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral 39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica 40. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=2 41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_I_of_Portugal 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=3 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavora_affair 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=4 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismology 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction 55. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit§ion=5 59. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jan 5 23:31:50 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 15:31:50 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Message-ID: <22876411.1104967910804.JavaMail.root@wamui06.slb.atl.earthlink.net> At the controls. -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker Sent: Jan 5, 2005 3:23 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org, "World Transhumanist Ass." , Transhuman Tech Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? Where Was God During the Tsunami? [There follows the Wikipedia article on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Socially, it was the most important earthquake in history, with the possible exception of the alleged earthquake that destroyed the alleged Atlantis, since the Lisbon earthquake lead to widespread doubts about the goodness of the Creator if not his existence. [The Plague also had by far the most important social impact in Europe, though it killed the same third of the population in China and India as it did in Europe. In Europe, the medieval theological fiction of the "just price" came to differ not greatly from the market price over the decades. But after the plague struck, the labor supply was so diminished that its price should have gone way up. The fiction of "finding the law" in eternal principles like the "just price" ceased to be viable. Common law, the accretion of judicial decisions, allowed the fiction to be maintained. If the principles say this happens in case A and that happens in case B, a judge would decide what happens in case A 1/2. The judge would not make law; he would find law by filling it in. A major overhaul of the law, called a statute, was very rare, though there was some movement in that direction with, say, the Second Statute of Westminster of 12. (Exactly why the First Statute was not a true statute, I am not sure.) [Anyhow, after the Black Death, one of the first statutes was the Statute of Laborers, which (futilely) tried to prevent the price of labor from rising. The trend to the deliberate creation of law, and thus a new concept of law, really got going as the result of the Black Death. By 1776 in a world changed, not by another plague, but by the experience of 193 years of having to deal with changed circumstances (dating from Roanoke Island), Mr. Jefferson could speak of "the Right of the People to ... institute new Government, laying its Foundations on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." [In China and India, the Plague caused no such upheaval from law as eternal to (ultimately) law as fostering happiness, and no earthquake outside of Europe triggered such a widespread questioning of religion. [Why?] Guardian: How can religious people explain something like this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1380094,00.html How can religious people explain something like this? Earthquakes led 18th-century thinkers to ask questions we shy away from Martin Kettle Tuesday December 28, 2004 The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it is. Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most of us realised. An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to religion. A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied. We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes." Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic terms. There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen? As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least wholly coherent. The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia. But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours sometimes prefers to think. For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens. Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes. Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself. Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world. Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life? From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things? [42]martin.kettle at guardian.co.uk -------------- To God, an age-old question The Telegraph - Calcutta : International http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041231/asp/foreign/story_4195540.asp A woman gestures as she cries on a street of Nagapattinam, some 350 km south of Chennai. (AFP) London, Dec. 30 (Reuters): It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history. It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern Indias Tamil Nadu. Why did you do this to us, God? she wailed. What did we do to upset you? Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the worlds great religions with such a basic test of faith as this weeks tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews. In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people? Traditionalists of diverse faiths described the destruction as part of gods plan, proof of his power and punishment for human sins. This is an expression of Gods great ire with the world, Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said. Pandit Harikrishna Shastri, a priest of New Delhis Birla temple said the disaster was caused by a huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth and driven by the positions of the planets. Azizan Abdul Razak, a Muslim cleric and vice president of Malaysias Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam se-Malaysia, said the disaster was a reminder from god that he created the world and can destroy the world. Many faiths believe disasters foretell the end of time or the coming of a Messiah. Some Christians expect chaos and destruction as foretold in the Bibles final book, Revelations. Maria, a 32-year-old Jehovahs Witness in Cyprus who believes that the apocalypse is coming said people who once slammed the door in her face were stopping to listen. It is a sign of the last days, she said. But for others, such calamities can prompt a repudiation of faith. Secularist Martin Kettle wrote in Britains Guardian newspaper that the tsunamis should force people to ask if the God can exist that can do such things? or if there is no God, just nature. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike, he wrote. A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. It is a question that clergy have to deal with nearly every day, not just at times of great catastrophe but when providing consolation for the daily sorrows of life, said US Rabbi Daniel Isaak, of Congregation Neveh Shalom, in Portland, Oregon. It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children, he said. In one modern view, he said, God does not interfere in the affairs of his creation. This is not something that God has done. The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. The issue isnt Why did God do this to us? but How do we human beings care for one another? ---------------------- Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Waves-of-destruction-wash-away-belief -in-Gods-benevolence/2004/12/29/1103996611542.html Sydney Morning Herald December 30, 2004 Compassion is the best response when humanity faces the problem of evil, writes Edward Spence. "Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened when the tsunami unleashed its terror. So we seek answers where answers are hard to come by, in either secular or sacred realms. Traditionally, the Judeo-Christian God, considered the most supreme and perfect being in the universe, has been ascribed the following necessary attributes: omniscience (all-knowing), omnipresence (present everywhere at all times and at once), omnipotence (almighty and powerful) and benevolence (all good and caring). How, then, did a God as powerful and benevolent as this allow such a thing to happen? If he is benevolent then he cannot also be omnipotent, for a God who has both these attributes would have wanted to, cared to and been able to prevent such a catastrophe. Perhaps, though omnipotent, He is not benevolent. That might explain why, although it was within His power to stop the tsunami, He simply chose not to: God has His own reasons and we are not to ask why. However, this answer will not suffice since by definition God is perfect. Being perfect, He must of necessity not merely be omnipotent but benevolent as well. A possible solution to this problem, traditionally known as the problem of evil, was offered by the heretical Manicheans, who believed not in one supreme being but two: one good God responsible for all the good things in life and another bad God, Satan, responsible for all the evil in the world. St Augustine, a follower in his early 20s, became an ardent critic of this doctrine, thinking a weak God powerless to defeat Satan was not worth worshipping. Philosophically, if God is perfect, then there can be only one perfect God, not two. In any case, evil is an imperfection and thus not a characteristic that can be attributed to God. If the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are at play and the deaths caused by the tsunami are a cosmic payback in the form of karma, does that offer a solution, albeit a philosophical one, to the problem of evil? I think not. For how can children, some as young as a few months, who had not yet lived their lives, deserve to be punished so cruelly for their past sins - especially when they have not been offered the promised divine opportunity to atone for those sins through another life? Even if solutions are forthcoming to these philosophical conundrums, humanely speaking they make little sense. Perhaps that is why some people remain sceptical about the presence of any divine providence ruling over us. A compromise solution, between secular scepticism and a psychological need for the sacred, was offered by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Although believing in gods, he claimed these divine beings would not want to diminish their heavenly happiness by mingling in the sordid affairs of mortals. For Epicurus, the gods were not crazy but simply indifferent to both human joys and sorrows. When it comes to social or natural evils, we are all alone. But if natural disasters are merely random events caused by the uncaring and blind forces of nature, does this offer us any comfort or meaning in the face of the apocalyptic events on Boxing Day? Even if our heads offer us such solutions, our hearts refuse to follow. For the problem of evil is an existential problem that confronts our own individual mortality and vulnerability to unknown and unexpected disasters. Ultimately, heartfelt tears shed in earnest and with compassion, with offerings of charity for those who have suffered, are more meaningful than any theological and philosophical treatise on the problem of evil. Especially at Christmas when, according to the gospels, love is the single core message. Perhaps this is the essence, if the legend is true, of what God learnt from us when He walked and suffered as a man among us. Ultimately, the problem of evil confronts us not as a puzzle to be solved but as a mystery to be experienced. And as Jesus and Plato before him indicated, the meaning of the mystery of life can be found only by experiencing another great mystery - the mystery of love. Dr Edward Spence is a philosopher at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University. -------------------- Tremors of Doubt: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami? http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097 BY DAVID B. HART Wall St. Journal. Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST On Nov. 1, 1755, a great earthquake struck offshore of Lisbon. In that city alone, some 60,000 perished, first from the tremors, then from the massive tsunami that arrived half an hour later. Fires consumed much of what remained of the city. The tidal waves spread death along the coasts of Iberia and North Africa. Voltaire's "Po?me sur le d?sastre de Lisbonne" of the following year was an exquisitely savage--though sober--assault upon the theodicies prevalent in his time. For those who would argue that "all is good" and "all is necessary," that the universe is an elaborately calibrated harmony of pain and pleasure, or that this is the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire's scorn was boundless: By what calculus of universal good can one reckon the value of "infants crushed upon their mothers' breasts," the dying "sad inhabitants of desolate shores," the whole "fatal chaos of individual miseries"? Perhaps the most disturbing argument against submission to "the will of God" in human suffering--especially the suffering of children--was placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by Dostoyevsky; but the evils Ivan enumerates are all acts of human cruelty, for which one can at least assign a clear culpability. Natural calamities usually seem a greater challenge to the certitudes of believers in a just and beneficent God than the sorrows induced by human iniquity. Considered dispassionately, though, man is part of the natural order, and his propensity for malice should be no less a scandal to the conscience of the metaphysical optimist than the most violent convulsions of the physical world. The same ancient question is apposite to the horrors of history and nature alike: Whence comes evil? And as Voltaire so elegantly apostrophizes, it is useless to invoke the balances of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in God's hand and he is not enchained. As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God. The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature. Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light. When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days. Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans). ------------------ CHE: The Cultural and Historical Significance of the Tsunami Disaster The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02602.htm By DAVID GLENN The terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired poems, novels, and decades of theological debate. The Managua earthquake of 1972 is widely believed to have hastened the end of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's regime in Nicaragua. (Somoza diverted international relief aid into private bank accounts; citizens were not amused.) Last month's Indian Ocean tsunamis will almost certainly have long-term repercussions of their own. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a professor of earth science at Wesleyan University, explores the aftermath of trauma in his new book, Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions (Princeton University Press), which he wrote with Donald Theodore Sanders, a freelance science writer. Q. You were born in Indonesia. Based on your studies of other earthquakes worldwide, how do you think this new disaster will shape the country's future? A. Events don't just stop short. The present situation that we have in Sumatra is very indicative of that. We are now terribly concerned about possibly as many as 100,000 people who might have died there. But we should also think about those who survived. There are many people who have settled along the coast to serve tourists...and have been able to invest, let's say, first in a bike, then a small motorbike, then maybe a small Toyota. And they were coming up in life from the lowermost poverty levels. Now, suddenly, within a few minutes, in an hour, all that is gone....It will take at least a decade for those people to reconstruct their lives. Q. In your book, you point out that after almost every major historical earthquake, people have argued that divine retribution was at work. A. Many people in Indonesia are well educated enough by now to no longer really believe in that. But there is still a strong religious undercurrent. So I'm very sure that a number of people there do believe that this is some kind of a punishment....That kind of fear will continue as long as there are aftershocks. And we know that after an earthquake like this, we'll have aftershocks for at least a year. So during this period, of course, people will go to churches and mosques and pray for liberation from continuing punishment, not realizing that this is a natural phenomenon that cannot be handled by whoever is upstairs. Q. It took weeks for people in the American colonies to learn about the Lisbon earthquake. Images of last week's tsunamis were transmitted immediately. A. It may mean that we also forget more quickly. We now see this, and we think, How terrible and how incredible, and We'll have to send some money. But like everything else in this world, things are going faster. So maybe in another month, other difficulties will attract the headlines. That's the kind of thing that I always find the most unfortunate. Over time I think we have become more shallow. -------------------- 1755 Lisbon earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake 1755 Lisbon earthquake According to Paul Kiernan, expert of Lisbon history and Partner at the H&K law firm in Washington DC, the 1755 [5]Lisbon earthquake took place on [6]November 1, [7]1755 at 9:20 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly [8]earthquakes in history, killing over 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a [9]tsunami and fire, resulting in the near total destruction of Lisbon. The quake had a strong impact on [10]18th century society, including accelerating a political conflict in [11]Portugal and being the subject of the first scientific study of an earthquake's effect over a large area. Modern [12]geologists estimate that the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the [13]Richter scale. Contents [14]1 The earthquake [15]2 The day after [16]3 Social implications [17]4 The birth of seismology [18]5 External link [[19]edit] The earthquake Missing image Convento_do_Carmo_ruins_in_Lisbon.jpg The [20]ruins of the Carmo convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake The earthquake struck in early morning of November 1, the [21]All Saints Day [22]Catholic holiday. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half to six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip apart the city centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing the sea floor, littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Tens of minutes later an enormous [23]tsunami engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days. Lisbon was not the only [24]Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. All the south of the country, namely the [25]Algarve, was affected and destruction was generalized. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout [26]Europe and [27]North Africa. Tsunamis up to twenty meters in height swept the coast from North Africa to [28]Finland and across the [29]Atlantic to [30]Martinique and [31]Barbados. Of a population of 275,000, about 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed across the [32]Mediterranean in [33]Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including its famous palaces and libraries. Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before, was burned to the ground. The Royal Palace stood just beside the [34]Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Pa?o, and was destroyed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume library and hundreds of works of art, including paintings by [35]Titian, [36]Rubens, and [37]Correggio, were lost. The precious royal archives concerning the exploration of the Atlantic and old documents also disappeared. The earthquake also destroyed the major churches of Lisbon, namely the [38]Cathedral of Santa Maria, and the [39]Basilicas of S?o Paulo, Santa Catarina, S?o Vincente de Fora, and the Misericordia. The ruins of the Carmo convent can still be visited today in the centre of the city. The Royal Hospital of All-Saints was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. [[40]edit] The day after Due to a stroke of luck, the royal family escaped unharmed from the catastrophe. King [41]Joseph I of Portugal and the court had left the city, after attending mass at sunrise. The reason was the will of one of the princesses to have a holy day away from the city. The king was very fond of his four daughters and decided to oblige her wishes. After the catastrophe, Joseph I developed a fear of living within walls, and the court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda, then in the outskirts of Lisbon. Like the king, the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo (the [42]Marquis of Pombal) survived the earthquake. With the pragmatism that characterized his rule, the prime minister immediately started to organize the reconstruction. He was not paralysed with shock and is reported to have answered: Now? We bury the dead and take care of the living. His quick response put fire-fighters in the city to extinguish the flames, and sent in teams to remove the thousands of corpses, quelling fears that corpses would lead to an epidemic. As for the city itself, the prime minister and the king hired architects and engineers and less than a year later, Lisbon was already free from the debris and being reconstructed. The king was keen to have a new, perfectly ordained city. Big squares and rectilinear, large avenues were the mottos of the new Lisbon. At the time, somebody asked the Marquis of Pombal what was the need of such wide streets. The Marquis answered: one day they will be small... And indeed, the chaotic traffic of Lisbon reflects the wisdom of the reply. The new downtown, known nowadays as the Pombaline Downtown, is one of Lisbon's attractions. These buildings are also among the first seismic protected constructions in the world. Small wooden models were built for testing and the earthquake was simulated by marching troops around them. [[43]edit] Social implications The earthquake shook a lot more than a city and its buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelisation of the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed every important church. For the religious minds of the 18th century, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain. In the following days, priests roamed the city hanging people suspected of heresy on sight, blaming them for the disaster. Many contemporary writers, such as [44]Voltaire, mentioned the earthquake on their writings. The Lisbon earthquake made many people wonder about the existence of a God who permitted these events to happen. In the internal politics, the earthquake was also devastating. The prime minister was the favourite of the king, but the high nobility despised him as an upstart. The feelings were returned and a constant struggle for power and royal favour was taking place. After November 1, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal severed the power of the aristocratic faction. Conflicts were constant and silent opposition to King Joseph I started to rise. This would end in an attempted murder of the king and the elimination of the powerful Tavora family. See [45]Tavora affair for the whole account. [[46]edit] The birth of [47]seismology The competent action of the prime minister was not limited to the practicalities of the reconstruction. The Marquis ordered a query to be sent to all [48]parishes of the country, regarding the earthquake and its effects. Questions included: * how long did the earthquake last? * how many aftershocks were felt? * what kind of damage was caused? * did animals behave strangely? (this question may sound strange but it anticipated studies by [49]Chinese seismologists in the 1960s) * what happened in the water holes? and many others. The answers are still archived in the Tower of Tombo, the national historical archive. Studying and cross-referencing the priests' accounts, modern scientists were able to reconstruct the event in a scientific perspective. Without the query designed by the [50]Marquis of Pombal, the first attempt of a seismological, objective description, this would be impossible. This is why the Marquis is regarded as the precursor of seismological sciences. The [51]geological causes of this earthquake and the seismic activity in the region of Lisbon are still being discussed by modern scientists. Since Lisbon is located in a centre of a [52]tectonic plate, there are no obvious reasons for the event. Portuguese geologists have suggested that the earthquake is related with the first steps of development of an [53]Atlantic [54]subduction zone. Note: Despite the fact that the prime minister Sebasti?o de Melo is mentioned here as [55]Marquis of Pombal, the title was only granted in [56]1770. See also: [57]List of earthquakes [[58]edit] External link * [59]Historical Depictions of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/) References 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologist 13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_earthquake 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_day_after 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#Social_implications 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#The_birth_of_seismol ogy 18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#External_link 19. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=1 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins 21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints_Day 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami 24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal 25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algarve 26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Africa 28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland 29. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinique 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados 32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_sea 33. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco 34. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus 35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titian 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubens 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_da_Correggio 38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral 39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica 40. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=2 41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_I_of_Portugal 42. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 43. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=3 44. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavora_affair 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=4 47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismology 48. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish 49. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 51. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology 52. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics 53. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction 55. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_of_Pombal 56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770 57. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes 58. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1755_Lisbon_earthquake&action= edit?ion=5 59. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 00:52:41 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:52:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Where Was God During the Tsunami? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <41DC8BD9.6070701@solution-consulting.com> Frank, thank you, an invigorating and challenging set of essays. Nice selection. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Where Was God During the Tsunami? > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 00:57:59 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:57:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> Message-ID: <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years disappears. People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle and turned into T-bills). Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: >Quoting Steve Hovland : > > >>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> > >And live longer. ;-) > >Christian > > > >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>Spans, Critics Say >> >>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>NYT December 31, 2004 >>By ROBERT PEAR >> >>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>worse. >> >>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >> >>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>increases in this century. The Social Security >>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >> >>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>one of the nation's leading demographers. >> >>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>research establishment is routinely producing important >>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>variety of diseases." >> >>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>potential room for improvement." >> >>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>more rapid growth. >> >>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>much earlier, in 2050. >> >>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>will exceed 86 in 2050. >> >>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>1950. >> >>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >> >>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>2000. >> >>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>decades." >> >>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >> >> >>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>position of other agencies and demographers." >> >>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >> >>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >> >>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>the size of the working-age population could increase >>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>immigrants. >> >>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>diseases. >> >>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >> >>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>in the 21st century." >> >>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>natural or biological limits. >> >>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >> >>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >> >>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>Social Security." >> >>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>Security benefits before they reach 65. >> >>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>lives in physically demanding jobs. >> >>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>well as Social Security, she said. >> >>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>with income." >> >>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >> >>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >> >>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 03:20:25 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 19:20:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <200501051725.j05HPQ008712@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <025201c4f39e$ab344b90$1503f604@S0027397558> If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of his labor should continue until he can no longer function with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came upon information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, H. Douglas Pratt. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Buck" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, >but of course his job > did not depend all that much on hand-eye > coordination! > > Cheers, Ross > > Ross Buck, Ph. D. > Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology > Communication Sciences U-1085 > University of Connecticut > Storrs, CT 06269-1085 > 860-486-4494 > fax 860-486-5422 > buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu > http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm > > > "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as > when they do it from > religious conviction." > > -- Blaise Pascal > > > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf > Of Geraldine Reinhardt > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 03:25:45 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 19:25:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com><1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the military and retire and 38. Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be employed (if only on the computer). Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years disappears. People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle and turned into T-bills). Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: Quoting Steve Hovland : Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) And live longer. ;-) Christian Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say NYT December 31, 2004 By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and measured. But many population experts say they believe that Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the 21st century, making the program's financial problems even worse. President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last century, and many independent demographers, citing the promise of biomedical research and the experience of some other industrialized countries, predict significant increases in this century. The Social Security Administration foresees a much slower rise. "Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's projections of longevity appear too conservative," said Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's leading demographers. Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical research establishment is routinely producing important breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a variety of diseases." Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, said: "There is a long history of government actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the potential room for improvement." Tables published by the government's National Center for Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows more rapid growth. Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be 81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached much earlier, in 2050. Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it will exceed 86 in 2050. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to 2000. Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in other developed countries has accelerated in recent decades." The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. "There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the position of other agencies and demographers." Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of longer life on Social Security's solvency. "The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy could be offset in several ways that do not involve a reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or the size of the working-age population could increase because of higher birth rates or a larger number of immigrants. Further, some population experts foresee developments that could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious diseases. "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline in the 21st century." On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, life expectancy in the United States is far from any natural or biological limits. "Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts have repeatedly been proved wrong." At various times, different countries have had the highest reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life expectancy in the leading country has increased an average of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers outside the government think that death rates will continue to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the projections of the Social Security Administration. Most think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of Social Security." Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65. Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their lives in physically demanding jobs. Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as well as Social Security, she said. "The United States is the richest major country in the world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated with income." She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so rich relative to its peers if you look at the average income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Jan 6 04:58:03 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 21:58:03 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com><1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> <026901c4f39f$6ada2f50$1503f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <41DCC55B.3010700@solution-consulting.com> Gerry's excitment about raising the retirement age is something I wish we can clone onto vast numbers. We have to create an atmosphere where people do love their work, find meaning in it, and feel valued and appreciated by society as they do work. Social psychologists might be able to craft messages about fulfillment from work and retirement being boring. LJ Geraldine Reinhardt wrote: > I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or > even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So > often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the > military and retire and 38. > Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to > mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be > employed (if only on the computer). > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something > earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I > was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic > boondoggle and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > >>Quoting Steve Hovland : >> >> >>>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> >> >>And live longer. ;-) >> >>Christian >> >> >> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>>Spans, Critics Say >>> >>>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>>NYT December 31, 2004 >>>By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>>worse. >>> >>>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >>> >>>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>>increases in this century. The Social Security >>>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >>> >>>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>>one of the nation's leading demographers. >>> >>>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>>research establishment is routinely producing important >>>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>>variety of diseases." >>> >>>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>>potential room for improvement." >>> >>>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>>more rapid growth. >>> >>>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>>much earlier, in 2050. >>> >>>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>>will exceed 86 in 2050. >>> >>>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>>1950. >>> >>>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >>> >>>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>>2000. >>> >>>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>>decades." >>> >>>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >>> >>> >>>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>>position of other agencies and demographers." >>> >>>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >>> >>>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >>> >>>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>>the size of the working-age population could increase >>>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>>immigrants. >>> >>>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>>diseases. >>> >>>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >>> >>>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>>in the 21st century." >>> >>>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>>natural or biological limits. >>> >>>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >>> >>>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >>> >>>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>>Social Security." >>> >>>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>>Security benefits before they reach 65. >>> >>>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>>lives in physically demanding jobs. >>> >>>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>>well as Social Security, she said. >>> >>>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>>with income." >>> >>>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >>> >>>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >>> >>>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 05:23:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:23:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F36C.C4B80BB0.shovland@mindspring.com> I have heard many people do their best work after 55. Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may take that long to gain enough skill and experience to do something really well. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of his labor should continue until he can no longer function with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came upon information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, H. Douglas Pratt. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Buck" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I understand that Dewey did his best work in his 80's, >but of course his job > did not depend all that much on hand-eye > coordination! > > Cheers, Ross > > Ross Buck, Ph. D. > Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology > Communication Sciences U-1085 > University of Connecticut > Storrs, CT 06269-1085 > 860-486-4494 > fax 860-486-5422 > buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu > http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm > > > "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as > when they do it from > religious conviction." > > -- Blaise Pascal > > > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf > Of Geraldine Reinhardt > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > Today on my way home I as usual took my designated > exit > off the freeway. There parked alongside the shoulder > of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black > sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked a > bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked and > asked if he needed help. > > Turns out that he was on his way to a medical > appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he needed > to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then > said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, > and > had become very confused trying to decipher his > secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was > recently widowed and was seeing his wife's > ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of > his > ability with glaucoma procedures. > > Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was > two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't > certain if the road was clearly marked. I then asked > the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd > lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I > then > asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his > appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll not > make it in time". > > "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for both > my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm > continuing....he alarmed me during my last > appointment > when he was talking about doing corrective eye > surgery". > > "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the > stranger. > > Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I > replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his > 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement > age. > > "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I > performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then > decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands > didn't > falter and I was always on top of each case." > > As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about > comparisons > between repairing eye stuff and capillary > surgery....were they similar? For me, the person who > needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright > and > brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different > from > capillaries? > > Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we > "looked" with our hearts? > > Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his > role > of physician? I'd say that if many of us can > continue > with our calling, doctors need to do the same. > But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger > partner. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Independent Scholar > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > >> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >> Critics Say >> NYT December 31, 2004 >> By ROBERT PEAR > > --snip-- > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 05:27:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:27:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Message-ID: <01C4F36D.5B483460.shovland@mindspring.com> This is something we need to take into our own hands, perhaps with some help from the system. After 20-25 years in any business most people are done with that profession. Sad to say, many people go through their entire life without becoming motivated by something that really turns them on. That is something mass media could help with, just running ads that ask: at this point in your life, what would you really like to do with your time. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 8:58 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say Gerry's excitment about raising the retirement age is something I wish we can clone onto vast numbers. We have to create an atmosphere where people do love their work, find meaning in it, and feel valued and appreciated by society as they do work. Social psychologists might be able to craft messages about fulfillment from work and retirement being boring. LJ Geraldine Reinhardt wrote: > I'm very excited about thoughts of making the retirement age 70 or > even 75. Then possibly career decisions will be made with care. So > often a teenager views his/her life in the short term.....join the > military and retire and 38. > Sitting around and watching the grass grow is very unfulfilling not to > mention boring. Even people with medical needs can find a way to be > employed (if only on the computer). > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:57 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future > LifeSpans, Critics Say > > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something > earlier, like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I > was in construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic > boondoggle and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > >>Quoting Steve Hovland : >> >> >>>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> >> >>And live longer. ;-) >> >>Christian >> >> >> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM >>>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life >>>Spans, Critics Say >>> >>>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say >>>NYT December 31, 2004 >>>By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses >>>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it >>>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and >>>measured. But many population experts say they believe that >>>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the >>>21st century, making the program's financial problems even >>>worse. >>> >>>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over >>>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not >>>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth >>>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. >>> >>>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last >>>century, and many independent demographers, citing the >>>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some >>>other industrialized countries, predict significant >>>increases in this century. The Social Security >>>Administration foresees a much slower rise. >>> >>>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the >>>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's >>>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said >>>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, >>>one of the nation's leading demographers. >>> >>>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in >>>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical >>>research establishment is routinely producing important >>>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a >>>variety of diseases." >>> >>>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National >>>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of >>>Health, said: "There is a long history of government >>>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in >>>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well >>>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries >>>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the >>>potential room for improvement." >>> >>>Tables published by the government's National Center for >>>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was >>>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 >>>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security >>>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just >>>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A >>>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows >>>more rapid growth. >>> >>>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be >>>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different >>>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached >>>much earlier, in 2050. >>> >>>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will >>>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it >>>will exceed 86 in 2050. >>> >>>For the American population as a whole in the last century, >>>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from >>>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy >>>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after >>>1950. >>> >>>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security >>>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain >>>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular >>>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." >>> >>>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower >>>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 >>>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that >>>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to >>>2000. >>> >>>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at >>>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee >>>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing >>>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. >>>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in >>>other developed countries has accelerated in recent >>>decades." >>> >>>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. >>> >>> >>>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this >>>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In >>>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the >>>position of other agencies and demographers." >>> >>>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of >>>longer life on Social Security's solvency. >>> >>>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy >>>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a >>>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. >>>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. >>> >>>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or >>>the size of the working-age population could increase >>>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of >>>immigrants. >>> >>>Further, some population experts foresee developments that >>>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social >>>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of >>>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of >>>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in >>>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of >>>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious >>>diseases. >>> >>>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, >>>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic >>>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the >>>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th >>>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in >>>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. >>> >>>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and >>>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline >>>in the 21st century." >>> >>>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the >>>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, >>>life expectancy in the United States is far from any >>>natural or biological limits. >>> >>>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is >>>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts >>>have repeatedly been proved wrong." >>> >>>At various times, different countries have had the highest >>>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable >>>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life >>>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average >>>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. >>> >>>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the >>>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National >>>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers >>>outside the government think that death rates will continue >>>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the >>>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most >>>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than >>>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of >>>Social Security." >>> >>>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend >>>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a >>>significant decline in chronic disability among the >>>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social >>>Security benefits before they reach 65. >>> >>>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to >>>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such >>>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their >>>lives in physically demanding jobs. >>> >>>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement >>>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life >>>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the >>>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could >>>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as >>>well as Social Security, she said. >>> >>>"The United States is the richest major country in the >>>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. >>>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated >>>with income." >>> >>>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at >>>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." >>> >>>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so >>>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average >>>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." >>> >>>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>_______________________________________________ >>>paleopsych mailing list >>>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > << File: ATT00024.html >> << File: ATT00025.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 05:30:43 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:30:43 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F36C.C4B80BB0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <032101c4f3b0$df39d740$1503f604@S0027397558> Doing good work after 55 is reserved for those NOT in the sciences....I've heard that scientists are washed up after 35. Since I'm a bit older than you, I marvel at when these young scholars THINK they have gained expertise in their discipline. I continue learning each day. Gerry Reinhart-Waller http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:23 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >I have heard many people do their best work after 55. > > Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may > take that long to gain enough skill and experience > to do something really well. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say > > If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of > his > labor should continue until he can no longer > function > with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over > 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came > upon > information that he and Jared Diamond have authored a > new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: > Speciation, > Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, > H. Douglas Pratt. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Ross Buck" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > >>I understand that Dewey did his best work in his >>80's, >>but of course his job >> did not depend all that much on hand-eye >> coordination! >> >> Cheers, Ross >> >> Ross Buck, Ph. D. >> Professor of Communication Sciences >> and Psychology >> Communication Sciences U-1085 >> University of Connecticut >> Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >> 860-486-4494 >> fax 860-486-5422 >> buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >> http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm >> >> >> "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as >> when they do it from >> religious conviction." >> >> -- Blaise Pascal >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf >> Of Geraldine Reinhardt >> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future >> LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated >> exit >> off the freeway. There parked alongside the >> shoulder >> of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black >> sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked >> a >> bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked >> and >> asked if he needed help. >> >> Turns out that he was on his way to a medical >> appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he >> needed >> to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then >> said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, >> and >> had become very confused trying to decipher his >> secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was >> recently widowed and was seeing his wife's >> ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of >> his >> ability with glaucoma procedures. >> >> Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it was >> two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I wasn't >> certain if the road was clearly marked. I then >> asked >> the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd >> lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I >> then >> asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his >> appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll >> not >> make it in time". >> >> "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for >> both >> my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm >> continuing....he alarmed me during my last >> appointment >> when he was talking about doing corrective eye >> surgery". >> >> "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the >> stranger. >> >> Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I >> replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in his >> 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement >> age. >> >> "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I >> performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then >> decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands >> didn't >> falter and I was always on top of each case." >> >> As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about >> comparisons >> between repairing eye stuff and capillary >> surgery....were they similar? For me, the person >> who >> needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright >> and >> brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different >> from >> capillaries? >> >> Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we >> "looked" with our hearts? >> >> Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his >> role >> of physician? I'd say that if many of us can >> continue >> with our calling, doctors need to do the same. >> But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger >> partner. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> Independent Scholar >> http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Steve Hovland" >> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >> >> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> >>> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >>> Critics Say >>> NYT December 31, 2004 >>> By ROBERT PEAR >> >> --snip-- >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jan 6 12:59:36 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:59:36 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... Message-ID: <1105016376.41dd3638b9903@rauh.net> I really enjoy the liberal/conservative image bits thing. This is my first take on the game. No one should be offended, it is not something that pops out randomly, there is a lot of thought put into this. Have fun, Christian Rauh -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: marilynmanson.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 12603 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: britneyspears.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 13277 bytes Desc: not available URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jan 6 13:07:30 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh (from webmail)) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 08:07:30 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say In-Reply-To: <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C4F272.CD4FD050.shovland@mindspring.com> <1104933850.41dbf3daaae79@rauh.net> <41DC8D17.60309@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <1105016850.41dd3812e0a12@rauh.net> It would be even more logical to teach math to policy makers and use equations instead of a constants to calculate such things. And then improve on the mathematical model, like we do in all sciences. A science of social security? Christian Quoting "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." : > It would be logical to simply raise the retirement age. For me, it is > now 66 years; why not make it 67 and finally 68? Push the concept > further: With 68 as the early retirement age, and 70 as the regular > retirement age, the cliff social security will run off in 30 years > disappears. > > People with medical need to retire should be allowed something earlier, > like roofers and cement workers (in a previous incarnation, I was in > construction). Unfortunately we have made social security an > entitlement, not a welfare system, which it actually is (none of my > money will come back to me, it has been spend on bureaucratic boondoggle > and turned into T-bills). > > Christian Rauh (from webmail) wrote: > > >Quoting Steve Hovland : > > > > > >>Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) > >> > >> > > > >And live longer. ;-) > > > >Christian > > > > > > > >>Steve Hovland > >>www.stevehovland.net > >> > >> > >>-----Original Message----- > >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > >>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:22 PM > >>To: World Transhumanist Ass.; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future Life > >>Spans, Critics Say > >> > >>Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, Critics Say > >>NYT December 31, 2004 > >>By ROBERT PEAR > >> > >>WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - When the federal government assesses > >>the long-term financial problems of Social Security, it > >>assumes that increases in life expectancy will be slow and > >>measured. But many population experts say they believe that > >>Americans' life expectancy will increase rapidly in the > >>21st century, making the program's financial problems even > >>worse. > >> > >>President Bush and Congress are preparing for a debate over > >>the future of Social Security, whose solvency depends not > >>only on factors including productivity, inflation and birth > >>rates but also on how long beneficiaries will be living. > >> > >>Life expectancy at birth increased by 30 years in the last > >>century, and many independent demographers, citing the > >>promise of biomedical research and the experience of some > >>other industrialized countries, predict significant > >>increases in this century. The Social Security > >>Administration foresees a much slower rise. > >> > >>"Life expectancy will make a very big difference in the > >>fiscal viability of Social Security, but the agency's > >>projections of longevity appear too conservative," said > >>Prof. Samuel H. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, > >>one of the nation's leading demographers. > >> > >>Dr. Preston said the agency assumed that "past advances in > >>life expectancy are unrepeatable, even though the medical > >>research establishment is routinely producing important > >>breakthroughs that reduce the incidence or fatality of a > >>variety of diseases." > >> > >>Richard M. Suzman, associate director of the National > >>Institute on Aging, a unit of the National Institutes of > >>Health, said: "There is a long history of government > >>actuaries and statisticians underestimating future gains in > >>life expectancy. The United States is unfortunately well > >>below the outer limits of life expectancy. Other countries > >>are doing much better. That gives us an indication of the > >>potential room for improvement." > >> > >>Tables published by the government's National Center for > >>Health Statistics show that life expectancy at birth was > >>47.3 years in 1900, rose to 68.2 by 1950 and reached 77.3 > >>in 2002. The latest annual report of the Social Security > >>trustees projects that life expectancy will increase just > >>six years in the next seven decades, to 83 in 2075. A > >>separate set of projections, by the Census Bureau, shows > >>more rapid growth. > >> > >>Social Security says male life expectancy at birth will be > >>81.2 years in 2075. The Census Bureau, using different > >>methods and assumptions, says that level will be reached > >>much earlier, in 2050. > >> > >>Likewise, Social Security says female life expectancy will > >>reach 85 years by 2075, while the Census Bureau says it > >>will exceed 86 in 2050. > >> > >>For the American population as a whole in the last century, > >>most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from > >>1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy > >>among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after > >>1950. > >> > >>Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security > >>Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain > >>forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular > >>disease, beginning in the late 1960's." > >> > >>The panel said Social Security was wrong to assume a slower > >>decline in mortality rates among the elderly in the next 75 > >>years. Rather, it said, the government should assume that > >>mortality will continue to decline as it did from 1950 to > >>2000. > >> > >>Ronald D. Lee, a professor of demography and economics at > >>the University of California, Berkeley, said: "I foresee > >>death rates of the elderly in the United States continuing > >>to decline at the same pace they have declined since 1950. > >>In fact, there is evidence that the pace of decline in > >>other developed countries has accelerated in recent > >>decades." > >> > >>The Social Security Administration defends its assumptions. > >> > >> > >>"There is a wide range of opinion among experts on this > >>issue," said Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for the agency. "In > >>the last few years, we've moved a bit closer to the > >>position of other agencies and demographers." > >> > >>Some experts say other factors could ease the effects of > >>longer life on Social Security's solvency. > >> > >>"The higher costs associated with longer life expectancy > >>could be offset in several ways that do not involve a > >>reduction of Social Security benefits," said John R. > >>Wilmoth, another demographer at Berkeley. > >> > >>People who live longer could work longer, for instance. Or > >>the size of the working-age population could increase > >>because of higher birth rates or a larger number of > >>immigrants. > >> > >>Further, some population experts foresee developments that > >>could wind up buttressing the forecasts of the Social > >>Security Administration. S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of > >>epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of > >>Illinois at Chicago, said the era of large increases in > >>life expectancy might be nearing an end, with the spread of > >>obesity and the possible re-emergence of deadly infectious > >>diseases. > >> > >>"There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, > >>vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic > >>engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the > >>gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th > >>century" with antibiotics, vaccinations and improvements in > >>sanitation, Dr. Olshansky said. > >> > >>Indeed, he said, without new measures on obesity and > >>communicable diseases, "human life expectancy could decline > >>in the 21st century." > >> > >>On the other hand, said James W. Vaupel, director of the > >>program on population, policy and aging at Duke University, > >>life expectancy in the United States is far from any > >>natural or biological limits. > >> > >>"Experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is > >>approaching a ceiling," Dr. Vaupel said. "These experts > >>have repeatedly been proved wrong." > >> > >>At various times, different countries have had the highest > >>reported at-birth life expectancy. But with "remarkable > >>regularity" over the last 160 years, Dr. Vaupel said, life > >>expectancy in the leading country has increased an average > >>of three months a year, or 2.5 years a decade. > >> > >>David A. Wise, a Harvard professor who is director of the > >>program on aging at the private, nonpartisan National > >>Bureau of Economic Research, said: "Almost all demographers > >>outside the government think that death rates will continue > >>to fall faster than the decline incorporated in the > >>projections of the Social Security Administration. Most > >>think life expectancy will increase more rapidly than > >>Social Security says. That's not good for the finances of > >>Social Security." > >> > >>Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend > >>toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a > >>significant decline in chronic disability among the > >>elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social > >>Security benefits before they reach 65. > >> > >>Labor unions and some politicians have resisted efforts to > >>raise the eligibility age for full benefits. Such > >>proposals, they say, penalize workers who have spent their > >>lives in physically demanding jobs. > >> > >>Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement > >>Research at Boston College, said, "Increases in life > >>expectancy at 65 have been a major contributor to the > >>rising cost of Social Security." Future increases could > >>strain pension plans and individual retirement savings, as > >>well as Social Security, she said. > >> > >>"The United States is the richest major country in the > >>world in terms of per capita gross domestic product," Dr. > >>Munnell said. "And life expectancy is clearly associated > >>with income." > >> > >>She added, though, that "if you focus on life expectancy at > >>age 65, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack." > >> > >>One reason, she said, is that "the United States is not so > >>rich relative to its peers if you look at the average > >>income going to the lowest 40 percent of the population." > >> > >>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html > >>_______________________________________________ > >>paleopsych mailing list > >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >>_______________________________________________ > >>paleopsych mailing list > >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > > >_______________________________________________ > >paleopsych mailing list > >paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > > > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 14:43:27 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 06:43:27 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... Message-ID: <01C4F3BB.07E79D30.shovland@mindspring.com> A good start. Actually, I think part of the point is to make things that some people will find highly offensive. For example, I would like to do things that make Christian Fundamentalists crazier than they already are. That would make it easier to isolate them and keep them from poisoning the mainstream. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh (from webmail) [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 5:00 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] For people to think about... I really enjoy the liberal/conservative image bits thing. This is my first take on the game. No one should be offended, it is not something that pops out randomly, there is a lot of thought put into this. Have fun, Christian Rauh << File: marilynmanson.jpg >> << File: britneyspears.jpg >> << File: ATT00015.txt >> From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 14:57:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 09:57:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Gerard Debreu, 83, Dies; Won Nobel in Economics Message-ID: Gerard Debreu, 83, Dies; Won Nobel in Economics New York Times, 5.1.6 By RIVA D. ATLAS Gerard Debreu, the winner of the 1983 Nobel in economic sciences for his research on the balance of supply and demand, died Friday in Paris. Mr. Debreu, who was 83, died of natural causes, according to a statement released yesterday by the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for nearly 30 years. His residence was an assisted-living center in Paris, where he moved about a year ago after suffering a stroke, his son-in-law, Richard De Soto, said. Mr. Debreu won the Nobel for his work on a mathematical approach to one of the most basic economic problems: how prices function to balance what producers supply with what buyers want. A slender 100-page book he wrote that was published in 1959, "Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium," is considered a classic of the field. "He brought to economics a mathematical rigor that had not been seen before," Prof. Robert Anderson said in the university's statement yesterday. In contrast to other winners in economics, Mr. Debreu focused on basic research rather than applications of economic theory. "You would not get much of an economic policy discussion out of him," Assar Lindbeck, chairman of the panel that reviewed nominations for the Nobel committee, said when he announced the award to Mr. Debreu 21 years ago. "He is the kind of teacher who starts in the top left corner of the blackboard, fills it with formulae and reaches the bottom right corner at the end of the class." Mr. Debreu's work had an impact on the work of many other economists, said Kenneth Arrow, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford who collaborated with Mr. Debreu in the 1950's. Economists applied Mr. Debreu's theories to problems like analyzing business cycles and measuring the cost to the economy of inefficiencies like traffic congestion, Mr. Arrow said. Mr. Debreu was born on July 4, 1921, in Calais, France; he became an American citizen in 1975. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1956. He broke off his studies in mathematics in 1944 after D-Day, to enlist in the French Army. He was an officer of the French Legion of Honor and a commander of the French National Order of Merit. >From 1950 to 1960, Mr. Debreu was associated with the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago; he was later at Yale University, serving as an associate professor. He worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford from 1960 to 1961. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1962, where he was a professor of economics and mathematics until his retirement in 1991. Mr. Debreu continued to lecture at Berkeley and elsewhere after his retirement, Mr. De Soto said. Mr. Debreu is survived by his wife, Francoise Debreu of Walnut Creek, Calif.; and two daughters, Chantal De Soto of Aptos, Calif., and Florence Tetrault of Vancouver, British Columbia. A service at the columbarium of P?re-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris will be held tomorrow. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/obituaries/06debreu.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:03:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:03:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Really?: The Claim: Sex Can Set Off a Heart Attack Message-ID: Really?: The Claim: Sex Can Set Off a Heart Attack NYT November 16, 2004 By ANAHAD O'CONNOR THE FACTS Rumors flew in 1979 when Nelson A. Rockefeller died of a heart attack in circumstances described by his speechwriter as "undeniably intimate." But the notion that sexual activity can touch off a heart attack has been around for some time. Experts say the belief that physical exertion in the bedroom places strain on the heart prompts many heart patients to limit their sexual activities or to abstain altogether. While there appears to be some truth to the claim, research suggests that it is largely exaggerated. In 1996, a team of scientists at Harvard conducted a study of more than 800 heart attack survivors around the country. Their findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that the chance of sex causing a heart attack was about two in a million, even in subjects who had already had one attack. That is double the risk for healthy people in the hours after sexual intercourse, they said, but still no real cause for concern for most people with cardiovascular disease. The study did not look at the intensity of the sexual activity or whether the relations were extramarital. It found that the risk of suffering a heart attack brought on by sex dropped as the participants' amount of exercise increased. People who exercised the most had virtually no risk. In 2001, a group of Swedish researchers who studied 699 heart attack survivors reported similar results, finding that the risk was small but highest among patients who were sedentary. Their study appeared in the journal Heart. "While there is some truth to the mythology," said Dr. Murray Mittleman, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the 1996 study, "the absolute increase in risk is so small that for the vast majority of people it should be one less thing to worry about." THE BOTTOM LINE Sexual activity can set off a heart attack, although the risk is extremely low. scitimes at nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/health/16real.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:04:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:04:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gannett: Aging boomers create demand for robots Message-ID: Aging boomers create demand for robots http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041115/NEWS05/411150323/1064 Monday, November 15, 2004 By Kevin Maney Gannett News Service You're in no danger, aging baby boomers. We'll clean and care for you and keep you company. Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie I, Robot, or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic Lost in Space warning of danger on lonely planets. The real force driving the development of personal robots -- and what eventually will create demand for them in the marketplace -- is aging baby boomers. That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. As boomers get older, they increasingly will be unable to care for themselves or their homes. They'll face a social and medical system straining to help them. But they'll be comfortable with technology. Robot experts predict that a decade from now, boomers might buy a specialized R2D2-like robot to clean the kitchen and a health care 'bot to monitor vital signs and make sure pills are taken. Yet another robot -- built more like a skinny, 5-foot-tall human -- might specialize in fetching things from shelves or the basement, reducing chances for falls. "As the demographics change, robots could help solve some problems," says Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The question is, where is that transition?" "At some point, there will be an explosion," says Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford University's AI lab. With that in mind, robot projects are popping up everywhere. Most are experimental, but some are becoming commercial products. Robots that are likely to serve the elderly seem to fall into three broad categories. Though the categories don't officially have names, you could call them homebots, carebots and joybots. A look at those categories speaks volumes about what's going on in robotics. Homebots The Roomba is Burlington, Mass.-based iRobot's first offering. Set it in the middle of a room, turn it on, and it finds its way around using artificial intelligence, vacuuming every square inch. Thrun says, "There will be robots that pick up dishes from the table and put them in the dishwasher within five years." That means that homebots probably will be some of the first mass-market robots, emerging just as boomers reach a point where they can't do much housework but don't want to move out of their homes. Still, early versions will be anything but perfect. Making even single-purpose robots has its difficulties. For example, computers and software still aren't good enough to give a robot the visual capabilities of a 2-year-old human. Carebots A handful of hospitals and nursing homes are experimenting with robots. At Johns Hopkins University Hospital, a gadget dubbed Robo-doc helps busy doctors monitor patients following surgery. Carnegie Mellon has worked on robots that can safely walk nursing home patients, for instance, from their rooms to the dining hall. Those are the early versions of carebots that could help tend to the elderly in their homes. A robot could autonomously do straightforward tasks such as monitor blood pressure, dispense pills and call 911 if its owner was in a heap on the floor and not moving. For more complex judgments, the Tbot could connect to and be controlled by a human nurse or doctor via the Internet. Much of that is possible within the next decade, robot experts say. But certain barriers persist. "To give health care to the elderly, robots need the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old, and we don't have that yet," says MIT's Brooks. Joybots "Whether or not you have to love your robot is another question," Brooks says. "I don't need my ATM to be cute." Here is a great point of departure between U.S. and Japanese robotics research. U.S. labs and companies generally approach robots as tools. The Japanese approach them as beings. That explains a lot about experimental robot projects coming out of Japan. Sony's Qrio looks humanoid, and the company bills it as "an entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy." It can learn to distinguish different people's faces and voices. But, it doesn't do housework. Such joybots one day might help with another difficulty that can accompany aging: loneliness. If so, a Qrio could become a significant segment of a coming personal robotics industry. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:05:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:05:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Humanities for Cocktail Parties and Beyond Message-ID: The Humanities for Cocktail Parties and Beyond The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18b00501.htm By RICK LIVINGSTON In any introductory-humanities course, there is an elephant-in-the-room question. I try to wait at least three weeks into the term before asking my students to face it squarely: Why study the humanities? The students' first response, of course, is because they have to. Most of my courses fulfill one of the general-education requirements at Ohio State University, and I usually have a healthy mix of precocious freshmen and procrastinating seniors. If I go on to ask why the students think the university has such requirements, they are initially baffled. After trying out a few wiseacre responses ("Because they want our tuition money!"), they almost always say -- wait for it -- that the humanities help you make small talk at cocktail parties. With any luck we go on to talk seriously about common knowledge and cultural expectations. But the cocktail-party comment tends to hang in the air like secondhand smoke, clouding the intellectual atmosphere. It suggests that our primary subject is petty snobbery and chitchat. The comment is a clich?, obviously, but one I have to confront every year. Thinking about the clich? sent me back to T.S. Eliot's 1950 play, The Cocktail Party. Eliot portrays social life as a series of hypocrisies, deceptions, and embarrassments, redeemable only by religious conversion. Theological insight alone, the play suggests, can help us endure the unending round of mannered niceties that make up an ordinary life. My students tend to shut down when I start talking about their souls, or they consult the syllabus to see whether I've included a conversion experience among the course requirements. In confronting the cocktail-party clich?, I've had to consider how to convey the value of the humanities without resorting to divine intervention. Luckily my position as associate director of a humanities institute on my campus has allowed me to experiment with alternative ways of engaging students in humanistic inquiry. One of the institute's missions is to bring students and faculty members together outside traditional classroom settings, as an antidote to the sometimes intimidating experience of attending one of the country's largest universities. Over the years we've learned that it is in such informal settings that students often begin to tie together the different subjects they've been studying. Connecting the dots allows them to get a larger picture of the education they've been receiving. That's why we've come up with a program we call (only half-jokingly) Big Ideas. Here's how it works: Each quarter we choose a topic big enough to accommodate a range of approaches and cover more than one discipline. Past examples include evil, passion, war, and cities. We invite both faculty members and outside guests to have dinner with students and to give us their thoughts about the topics. Brief presentations are followed by open conversation, with students taking the lead in raising questions and responding. Although we do bring in some of the best teachers at the university, the goal of Big Ideas is not really to teach the students specific facts. It is to give them practice in taking ideas seriously and to allow them to experience interesting conversations. You're probably thinking: "Shouldn't they be doing that on their own? When I was in college, we would stay up late talking about ideas. What's wrong with these kids?" But conversation about ideas seldom happens naturally, and nowadays it is rarer than ever. As historians of talk like Theodore Zeldin and Peter Burke have observed, conversation is not a spontaneous outpouring of well-formed sentences. It is a specific form of social behavior, with its own settings, tacit rules, and strategies. Like any social skill, it improves with practice. Students today have few chances to practice serious talking. Our most visible examples of conversation come from TV: the political debate that is little more than a shouting match, and the celebrity interview. What students lack is experience with grown-up conversation, in which curiosity and respect can lead to self-discovery and mutual illumination. At their best, the Big Ideas classes get students involved in such conversations. Our course on evil, for instance, picked up on President Bush's use of a morally charged vocabulary (the "axis of evil") to orient U.S. foreign policy. We brought in four guest speakers: a philosopher, a historian of religion, a theologian, and a judge. Then students talked about personal experiences with evil, ranging from anger to sexual abuse, and about evil in the world -- including terrorism and the Holocaust. In the process, students confronted their own beliefs about God and human nature, and tested their intuitions about differences among the illegal, the immoral, and the downright evil. Nothing was resolved, of course, but the students got a clearer sense of the necessity -- and the difficulty -- of making such distinctions. In our course on cities, we began by talking about the places where we had grown up, and how they had changed over our lifetimes. We met with an architect to talk about high rises and skylines. Ideas about consumerism and sustainability became the focus of a class with an urban planner, and a sociologist talked with us about the effects of globalization on the shape of cities. Finally, an artist who is designing a waterfront park came to discuss ideas about making public art in and out of neglected urban spaces. Students learned a vocabulary for talking about the changes they can see happening in their neighborhoods as well as in the world at large. Inevitably, there is a certain amount of overlap among the sessions; predictably, discussions sometimes meander and leave the topic altogether. But most of the sessions include a moment when some of the students catch fire and carry the rest of us forward, or when someone gets the idea of dialogical inquiry and asks more, and better, questions. Sometimes students discover that their intuitions don't match their convictions. Most interesting, however, are the times when, as in the discussion of war and peace during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, we find ourselves trying hard to make sense of the world together. I've thought a lot about what makes the courses work. The topics belong to no one field: Different disciplines may contribute perspectives to the issues we cover, but when faced with the problem of evil, for instance, we are all amateurs. We use no set body of material, and students' own experiences and examples often become common points of reference. Each course is for one academic credit -- enough to make the students take the class seriously; but the grade is pass or fail, so students don't need to demonstrate mastery of a subject. To keep the atmosphere informal, we meet in a dining hall rather than a classroom. And mixing up faculty members with outside guests shows that ideas can live off campus, too. Maybe the most unexpected lesson of Big Ideas, however, is that professors appreciate making conversation, too. It can be tough to step out of the comfort zones of our expertise, to let go of disciplinary jargon. But the opportunity to speak, not as a professional to novices, but as a citizen with other (albeit younger) citizens, can be liberating. It's not just a cocktail party -- and that, I think, is the main point. Rick Livingston is the associate director of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities and a senior lecturer in comparative studies at Ohio State University at Columbus. From checker at panix.com Thu Jan 6 15:08:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:08:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sex, Booze, and Getting Old - Welcome to the Human Nature blog. By William Saletan Message-ID: Sex, Booze, and Getting Old - Welcome to the Human Nature blog. By William Saletan http://slate.msn.com/id/2111786/ 5.1.4 You and I are cultural and political creatures living in an age of science and technology. From sexuality to liposuction to surveillance to cloning, we're being overrun by technologies full of implications about who we are and how we should live. The purpose of Human Nature is to expose and discuss those implications. In the weeks to come, what you'll find here is a steady diet of news updates and quick takes, coupled with longer columns exploring some topics more thoroughly. Let's start with a few updates. DEATH Item: We're going to live longer than Social Security administrators expect. Source: "many population experts" Outlet: [28]New York Times, Dec. 31 Gist: Life expectancy at birth rose 21 years from 1900 to 1950 (47.3 to 68.2) and another nine years from 1950 to 2002, reaching 77.3 years. The Social Security Administration assumes life expectancy will now grow more slowly, increasing only six years by 2075. Longevity experts say this assumption is too low. Why? 1) Life expectancy has increased by three months per year pretty regularly for 160 years. 2) Government projections have historically underestimated increases in longevity. 3) After 1950, although the rate of increase declined for the general population, it increased for the population over age 65. 4) Our average life expectancy is far below any biological "ceiling." Financial implication: We're doing such a good job of keeping people alive that we're going to bankrupt ourselves. Critique: Three of the four "expert" arguments are social science dressed up as natural science. They're just demographic extrapolations from the past to the future, with no biological theory to explain why we could increase the longevity of old people as easily as we increased the longevity of young people. The fourth argument is biological but tells us only about a ceiling. It doesn't matter how high the ceiling is if we don't have a ladder to get there--and that's the argument on the other side. As the token skeptic puts it in the Times, "There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20^th century." Buried political story: Read down to the 10^th paragraph of the Times article. For the American population as a whole in the last century, most of the gains in life expectancy at birth occurred from 1900 to 1950. But most of the gains in life expectancy among people who had already reached age 65 were seen after 1950. Last year an expert panel advising the Social Security Administration found "an unprecedented reduction in certain forms of old-age mortality, especially cardiovascular disease, beginning in the late 1960's." In other words, as old people increased their share of the country's economic and political power, they consumed more of the country's medical attention. Further down, the Times adds, "Nor do economists generally foresee a reversal of the trend toward early retirement. Though researchers have observed a significant decline in chronic disability among the elderly, most workers retire and begin drawing Social Security benefits before they reach 65." Disability down. Cardiovascular disease down. Longevity up. Social Security benefits earlier. This isn't a biological problem. It's a political problem. Punch line: Two other problems may solve this one. One expert observes that obesity is proliferating and lethal infectious diseases are thriving in our increasingly connected world. Human self-destruction may spare us the financial cost of human self-absorption. SEX Item: More adult women are having unprotected intercourse. Source: [29]National Center for Health Statistics Outlet: [30]Washington Post, Jan. 4 Gist: From 1995 to 2002, the percentage of sexually active adult women not using contraception rose from 5.2 to 7.4. This could increase unintended pregnancies by more than 20 percent. Liberal spin: This is the tragic result of insufficient sex education, too much abstinence-only curriculum, more people without insurance coverage, and lower federal funding of family planning relative to inflation. One liberal complains that drug companies "have cut way back" on free samples and tells the Post, "It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [a month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free." Critique: 1) If erosion of sex ed is the problem, why is contraceptive use [31]increasing among teenagers? 2) Before you blame health insurers and drug companies, ask how safe, reliable, and expensive birth control was before they got into it. 3) Doesn't "co-pay" mean we're socializing some of the cost, and nobody's getting off scot-free? 4) Have we really been relying on free samples to get birth control to poor women? If so, shouldn't we make that subsidy public and stop leeching off greedy drug companies? Conservative spin: Women are rejecting birth control because they want to get pregnant or don't like birth control's side effects. An abstinence proponent tells the Post, "The women making these choices are making a conscious choice. They are not stupid." Critique: We'll quote you on that next time you propose legislation--like, say, [32]S. 2466--to regulate women's choices on the grounds that they're dupes of the abortion industry. FAT Item: There's no evidence that commercial weight-loss programs work. Source: [33]Annals of Internal Medicine Outlet: [34]New York Times, Jan. 4 Gist: 1) Virtually no commercial diet program has "published reliable data from randomized trials showing that people who participated weighed less a few months later than people who did not participate." 2) Since there's no good evidence, maybe you should avoid the most expensive programs. 3) The most expensive programs are supervised by doctors. 4) "Doctors could do as well as these programs" just by telling people to diet and exercise. 5) All diet programs fail because "they're fighting biology." Critique: Thanks for the help. VICE Item: Medicare will pay for alcoholism screening and for counseling to quit smoking. Source: [35]Medicare administrators Outlets: New York Times, Dec. 24; [36]Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2 Gist: Alcoholism screening begins this week. Coverage of smoking cessation counseling begins in March. Both will cost a lot of money but save more by preventing cancer, heart and liver disease, and other maladies. Cultural analysis: We're socializing treatment of smoking and drinking because we now view them as diseases, not vices. Economic analysis: We socialized treatment of the consequences of smoking and drinking when we created Medicare 40 years ago. Now we're just cutting costs. William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of [37]Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. References 28. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/politics/31benefit.html 29. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad350.pdf 30. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45599-2005Jan3.html 31. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_024.pdf 32. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/Fetal_Pain/S2466.html 33. http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/142/1/56 34. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/nutrition/04fat.html 35. http://www.cms.hhs.gov/ 36. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-medicare2jan02,1,1081095.story?coll=la-headlines-nation 37. http://www.bearingright.com/ From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 15:54:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:54:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Real time politics Message-ID: <01C4F3C4.F8C29DA0.shovland@mindspring.com> This was being faxed to congress during the confirmation hearing: Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 118685 bytes Desc: not available URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jan 6 21:19:30 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:19:30 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say References: <01C4F3BA.96FE95B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <059301c4f435$6a1c4c60$7a03f604@S0027397558> A giant uroborus is at work devouring our creativity be we engineers or other corporate types. Yet there are many of us who choose careers other than the business world. Those of us in such lifeways have all the leeway to THINK yet receive little in the way of monetary compensation. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Geraldine Reinhardt'" Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 6:40 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > In many corporate situations engineers are less > inventive after a certain age, but it's not because > they are less creative. > > It's because they know that if they do something > brilliant they won't get much more than a pat on > the back and a demand to do something even > better. They know that most of the financial > rewards will go to managers. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:31 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: shovland at mindspring.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > Doing good work after 55 is reserved for those NOT in > the sciences....I've heard that scientists are washed > up after 35. > > Since I'm a bit older than you, I marvel at when > these > young scholars THINK they have gained expertise in > their discipline. I continue learning each day. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:23 PM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security > Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say > > >>I have heard many people do their best work after 55. >> >> Having reached that age, it seems to me that it may >> take that long to gain enough skill and experience >> to do something really well. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Geraldine Reinhardt >> [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:20 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >> >> If a scholar does excellent work then the fruits of >> his >> labor should continue until he can no longer >> function >> with either a pen or keyboard. Ernst Mayr, now over >> 100 years old, is such a person. I recently came >> upon >> information that he and Jared Diamond have authored >> a >> new text: The Birds of Northern Melanesia: >> Speciation, >> Ecology, & Biogeography by Ernst Mayr, Jared >> Diamond, >> H. Douglas Pratt. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Ross Buck" >> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >> >> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 9:11 AM >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >> Underestimates Future LifeSpans,Critics Say >> >> >>>I understand that Dewey did his best work in his >>>80's, >>>but of course his job >>> did not depend all that much on hand-eye >>> coordination! >>> >>> Cheers, Ross >>> >>> Ross Buck, Ph. D. >>> Professor of Communication Sciences >>> and Psychology >>> Communication Sciences U-1085 >>> University of Connecticut >>> Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >>> 860-486-4494 >>> fax 860-486-5422 >>> buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >>> http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm >>> >>> >>> "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as >>> when they do it from >>> religious conviction." >>> >>> -- Blaise Pascal >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >>> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On >>> Behalf >>> Of Geraldine Reinhardt >>> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 9:14 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >>> Underestimates Future >>> LifeSpans, Critics Say >>> >>> Today on my way home I as usual took my designated >>> exit >>> off the freeway. There parked alongside the >>> shoulder >>> of road was an elderly gentleman in a fancy black >>> sedan. Usually I never stop but this person looked >>> a >>> bit bewildered.....actually confused, so I braked >>> and >>> asked if he needed help. >>> >>> Turns out that he was on his way to a medical >>> appointment, an eye doctor to be exact, and he >>> needed >>> to know which direction for Pasteur Drive. He then >>> said he was from San Francisco, a doctor himself, >>> and >>> had become very confused trying to decipher his >>> secretary's directions. He also mentioned he was >>> recently widowed and was seeing his wife's >>> ophthalmologist because she had spoken so highly of >>> his >>> ability with glaucoma procedures. >>> >>> Now I knew very well where Pasteur Drive was (it >>> was >>> two exits beyond my apartment turn off) but I >>> wasn't >>> certain if the road was clearly marked. I then >>> asked >>> the gentleman if he would like to follow me and I'd >>> lead him to his turn off. How happy he became! I >>> then >>> asked the name of the ophthalmologist he had his >>> appointment with. "Dr. Rubin.....only I know I'll >>> not >>> make it in time". >>> >>> "Amazing", I replied. "He's the eye doctor for >>> both >>> my husband and me"! "But.... I don't know if I'm >>> continuing....he alarmed me during my last >>> appointment >>> when he was talking about doing corrective eye >>> surgery". >>> >>> "How old do you suppose Dr. Rubin is", asked the >>> stranger. >>> >>> Not wishing to age Dr. Rubin more than his years, I >>> replied: "Maybe in his late 50's or somewhere in >>> his >>> 60's". I knew Rubin had to be hitting retirement >>> age. >>> >>> "Oh" replied the doctor from San Francisco, "I >>> performed capillary surgery until I was 73 and then >>> decided I needed to give it up". "Yet my hands >>> didn't >>> falter and I was always on top of each case." >>> >>> As I drove to Pasteur Drive I thought about >>> comparisons >>> between repairing eye stuff and capillary >>> surgery....were they similar? For me, the person >>> who >>> needs to operate on my eyes should be young, bright >>> and >>> brilliant. Yet why should eyes be that different >>> from >>> capillaries? >>> >>> Could be that we "see with our eyes". What if we >>> "looked" with our hearts? >>> >>> Either way, when is a doctor too old to assume his >>> role >>> of physician? I'd say that if many of us can >>> continue >>> with our calling, doctors need to do the same. >>> But....I'd like my eye-surgeon to retain a younger >>> partner. >>> >>> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >>> Independent Scholar >>> http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk >>> >>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- >>> From: "Steve Hovland" >>> To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >>> >>> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 3:33 PM >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] NYT: Social Security >>> Underestimates Future LifeSpans, Critics Say >>> >>> >>>> Get ready to work longer than you expected :-) >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> Social Security Underestimates Future Life Spans, >>>> Critics Say >>>> NYT December 31, 2004 >>>> By ROBERT PEAR >>> >>> --snip-- >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Jan 6 21:52:28 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:52:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy In-Reply-To: <200501061555.j06FtI018677@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians.<< --What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute natural disasters to the will of a powerful being whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the view of God as benevolent ruler. "Oh, so it wasn't God, it was THEM!! They brought God's wrath upon us!" (or eliminate God from the equation altogether, by blaming Jews, Americans, or whatever group seems all-powerful and easy to blame). Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jan 6 22:04:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 14:04:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy Message-ID: <01C4F3F8.9B11CAD0.shovland@mindspring.com> The God that really is God has nothing to do with these human concerns. I do not find it comfortable to believe that, but I think it is true. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 1:52 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians.<< --What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute natural disasters to the will of a powerful being whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the view of God as benevolent ruler. "Oh, so it wasn't God, it was THEM!! They brought God's wrath upon us!" (or eliminate God from the equation altogether, by blaming Jews, Americans, or whatever group seems all-powerful and easy to blame). Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Fri Jan 7 18:28:01 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 13:28:01 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy In-Reply-To: <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200501061555.j06FtI018677@tick.javien.com> <20050106215228.90700.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050107125732.01dd5968@incoming.verizon.net> At 04:52 PM 1/6/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to >upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a >heart-wrenching question asked in common these past >few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and >Christians.<< > >--What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute >natural disasters to the will of a powerful being >whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid >thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming >other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the The press says it happened already. In a way, it is not totally surprising. Some people asked:"Who would want to kill hundreds of thousands of Moslems, and is the most powerful person who would want to do so?" So they concluded: "It must be George Bush. As Osama says, the US is the great Satan, and Satan has great powers, so of course he did this..." If I believe the press... there are many, many people who have followed this obvious human-style logic. Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about? Yesterday, my family had me watch a DVD which offers one possible answer: The Day After Tomorrow. When it came out, the press was full of righteous indignation about this "speculative transparent anti-Bush propaganda." I didn't see it then... in part because I don't GO to the movies much at all anyway. But... I wonder how much our defensive reactions are a kind of hiding from reality as bad as the example Michael mentioned? Certainly the "little Ice Age" scenario for this century is very speculative (SO FAR AS I KNOW, being a scientist but nonspecialist.). But so far as I know, it is just as speculative to say it won't happen as to say it will. OK, that's a comment on the limits of my knowledge. In this context, I regret I did not sit in in the recent NSF workshop on this topic. It would be nice to have a sense of the conditional probabilities here. But I didn't see anything really crazy in the movie... except perhaps the relatively happy ending. All along, I have been thinking... OK, in the worst case we might lose about half the human economic base over about a century. But on a logarithmic scale, that is not nearly so bad as two or three other risks -- such as proliferation and possible use of WMD, or the long-term impact of the stagnation which might result if people overreact against technology, or perhaps even some kind of spiritual crisis -- all of which threaten outright extinction. The movie brings home the point that "half" may still be rather unpleasant, and that Little Ice Ages have been a bit faster than a century in the past. Yes, we shouldn't expect it to happen... but it seems more likely, say, than the 3 percent probability asteroid they thought we were facing briefly a week ago. A rational person does not ignore such odds. It would be like crossing a street without looking both ways, at an hour when the odds are 30-to-1 against a car hitting you. Now -- the movie raises the valid point in logic that we should not waste half the world's GNP growth over the next century, with certainly, in order to avoid, say, a 10 percent POSSIBILITY of losing half of it. It does not mention how Kyoto has a bigger impact on GNP than on CO2, under today's circumstances. (And I do not know if it is really 10 percent probability. Could be much more or less, conditional upon knowledge which exists which I have not calibrated. But I certainly would NOT defer to biased political partisans on either side.) HOWEVER -- WHAT IF the actions needed to cut CO2 by a factor of 6 in 30 years happen to be almost exactly the same as what we need to reduce the probability of the OTHER more definite types of catastrophes involving dependence on imported oil and gas? (It used to be "imported oil" -- but things have changed in a very serious way already over the past few decades.) Do any of you folks have opinions about the work of Cavallo at DHS, like his paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists? What if those actions look as if they would actually end up bringing a long-term net PROFIT to the economy, instead of costing trillions? After the movie... I came away with a sort of shock a bit different from what most people would legitimately experience. Some people would feel self-righteous in the following way: "I have marched against CO2, so I'm OK." No way. That's like marching for happiness. I does no good at all if it does not actually strengthen real action. Maybe some epsilon benefit, but no more. So OK... having human weaknesses... there is an element of self-righteousness in my reaction too. I like to believe I have done more than anyone else on earth to actually push us to a real solution that could prevent that kind of risk. (Did I send copies of my slides describing my proposal for a "Middle Way" strategy on CO2? It has some resemblence to -- and citation of -- the work by Marty Hoffert et al published in Science a year and a half ago -- but it is different in carrying it forward to the action implications. And besides, Marty did give me a chance to feed into the Science paper a bit as well.) But... I have a long history of making the right point at the right time, but not energetically enough. This time, I have probably been more effective in the use of time to that end, but even so I have "day job" stuff (restarting next Monday) and some unique responsibilities in basic science... and maybe one lesson from the movie is that this deserves more full-time championing of the right logic than I am yet putting into it. On the other hand .. full-time champions and correct logic do not always go together, and the champions these days (outside of industry) usually aren't into the kinds of partnerships that might address the gap... too much ego out there... Maybe the Clinton/Gore partnership was very effective at one time, in this kind of way, but Gore drifted away from a lot of his original search-for-the-truth role. Political flattery can be ever so seductive to so many people... =================================== Well, enough words. Back to restudying magnetic monopoles... while I still have a chance... Best, Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 7 18:39:58 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 10:39:58 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy Message-ID: <01C4F4A5.3C82C200.shovland@mindspring.com> I think that humanity en masse is more likely to continue along crazily, so perhaps the best we can do is save ourselves, save our families, save anyone who is rational enough to listen and prepare. When I am doing photography, I compete with a bunch of people who have fallen into the habit of flying around the world taking pictures. I am deliberately concentrating on one world class city, San Francisco. When the peak oil s*** hits the fan I will have established myself as the go-to- man in the Bay Area for a lot of people. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 10:28 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] disaster fallacy At 04:52 PM 1/6/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: > >>"Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to >upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a >heart-wrenching question asked in common these past >few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and >Christians.<< > >--What a horribly mistaken question! To attribute >natural disasters to the will of a powerful being >whose judgment is beyond question is such a horrid >thing to do to oneself and one's children. Blaming >other humans cannot be far behind, if it preserves the The press says it happened already. In a way, it is not totally surprising. Some people asked:"Who would want to kill hundreds of thousands of Moslems, and is the most powerful person who would want to do so?" So they concluded: "It must be George Bush. As Osama says, the US is the great Satan, and Satan has great powers, so of course he did this..." If I believe the press... there are many, many people who have followed this obvious human-style logic. Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about? Yesterday, my family had me watch a DVD which offers one possible answer: The Day After Tomorrow. When it came out, the press was full of righteous indignation about this "speculative transparent anti-Bush propaganda." I didn't see it then... in part because I don't GO to the movies much at all anyway. But... I wonder how much our defensive reactions are a kind of hiding from reality as bad as the example Michael mentioned? Certainly the "little Ice Age" scenario for this century is very speculative (SO FAR AS I KNOW, being a scientist but nonspecialist.). But so far as I know, it is just as speculative to say it won't happen as to say it will. OK, that's a comment on the limits of my knowledge. In this context, I regret I did not sit in in the recent NSF workshop on this topic. It would be nice to have a sense of the conditional probabilities here. But I didn't see anything really crazy in the movie... except perhaps the relatively happy ending. All along, I have been thinking... OK, in the worst case we might lose about half the human economic base over about a century. But on a logarithmic scale, that is not nearly so bad as two or three other risks -- such as proliferation and possible use of WMD, or the long-term impact of the stagnation which might result if people overreact against technology, or perhaps even some kind of spiritual crisis -- all of which threaten outright extinction. The movie brings home the point that "half" may still be rather unpleasant, and that Little Ice Ages have been a bit faster than a century in the past. Yes, we shouldn't expect it to happen... but it seems more likely, say, than the 3 percent probability asteroid they thought we were facing briefly a week ago. A rational person does not ignore such odds. It would be like crossing a street without looking both ways, at an hour when the odds are 30-to-1 against a car hitting you. Now -- the movie raises the valid point in logic that we should not waste half the world's GNP growth over the next century, with certainly, in order to avoid, say, a 10 percent POSSIBILITY of losing half of it. It does not mention how Kyoto has a bigger impact on GNP than on CO2, under today's circumstances. (And I do not know if it is really 10 percent probability. Could be much more or less, conditional upon knowledge which exists which I have not calibrated. But I certainly would NOT defer to biased political partisans on either side.) HOWEVER -- WHAT IF the actions needed to cut CO2 by a factor of 6 in 30 years happen to be almost exactly the same as what we need to reduce the probability of the OTHER more definite types of catastrophes involving dependence on imported oil and gas? (It used to be "imported oil" -- but things have changed in a very serious way already over the past few decades.) Do any of you folks have opinions about the work of Cavallo at DHS, like his paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists? What if those actions look as if they would actually end up bringing a long-term net PROFIT to the economy, instead of costing trillions? After the movie... I came away with a sort of shock a bit different from what most people would legitimately experience. Some people would feel self-righteous in the following way: "I have marched against CO2, so I'm OK." No way. That's like marching for happiness. I does no good at all if it does not actually strengthen real action. Maybe some epsilon benefit, but no more. So OK... having human weaknesses... there is an element of self-righteousness in my reaction too. I like to believe I have done more than anyone else on earth to actually push us to a real solution that could prevent that kind of risk. (Did I send copies of my slides describing my proposal for a "Middle Way" strategy on CO2? It has some resemblence to -- and citation of -- the work by Marty Hoffert et al published in Science a year and a half ago -- but it is different in carrying it forward to the action implications. And besides, Marty did give me a chance to feed into the Science paper a bit as well.) But... I have a long history of making the right point at the right time, but not energetically enough. This time, I have probably been more effective in the use of time to that end, but even so I have "day job" stuff (restarting next Monday) and some unique responsibilities in basic science... and maybe one lesson from the movie is that this deserves more full-time championing of the right logic than I am yet putting into it. On the other hand .. full-time champions and correct logic do not always go together, and the champions these days (outside of industry) usually aren't into the kinds of partnerships that might address the gap... too much ego out there... Maybe the Clinton/Gore partnership was very effective at one time, in this kind of way, but Gore drifted away from a lot of his original search-for-the-truth role. Political flattery can be ever so seductive to so many people... =================================== Well, enough words. Back to restudying magnetic monopoles... while I still have a chance... Best, Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jan 7 20:06:20 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:06:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection In-Reply-To: <200501071900.j07J08027146@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050107200620.78545.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about?<< --Always a good question (usually asked of the "other side" but not one's own). I do see hysteria on both the Left and the Right in the US, as well as utopianism, political correctness and other blind spots. It seems to be a product of the mass splitting in half, each half projecting its own blindness onto the other, its own dark side, its own self-importance and arrogance. Those who can stand in the middle and avoid fallacies on either side are few and far between, although I'm sure we all have moments where we reluctantly take one side for pragmatic reasons, not entirely secure in adopting that side's total worldview. Perhaps what is really missing is a systems theory view of beliefs in general. One side can accuse the other of being blind, without seeing how its own position is increasingly determined by blind opposition to the other. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jan 7 20:20:40 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:20:40 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection Message-ID: <01C4F4B3.4DFDD2A0.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm not sure that the right/left divide is as serious as conservative media bias would have us believe. I do think there is some value in fragmenting the body politic into many pieces so we can reconstitute some major blocks that make sense at this point in time. We live in a strange world where beliefs have more status than facts. Can't get too much crazier than that :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 12:06 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] introspection >>Aside from the obvious issues of therapy... the real zinger question is as follows: since we too are human, and not born any better than these crazy people, what is it that we are being equally crazy about?<< --Always a good question (usually asked of the "other side" but not one's own). I do see hysteria on both the Left and the Right in the US, as well as utopianism, political correctness and other blind spots. It seems to be a product of the mass splitting in half, each half projecting its own blindness onto the other, its own dark side, its own self-importance and arrogance. Those who can stand in the middle and avoid fallacies on either side are few and far between, although I'm sure we all have moments where we reluctantly take one side for pragmatic reasons, not entirely secure in adopting that side's total worldview. Perhaps what is really missing is a systems theory view of beliefs in general. One side can accuse the other of being blind, without seeing how its own position is increasingly determined by blind opposition to the other. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Fri Jan 7 20:44:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 15:44:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: The World Question Center 2005 Message-ID: Howard, For your leisurely weekend reading. I draw specific attention to the responses by Zimbardo (mentions the Lucifer Effect), Alun Anderson, Pentland, Lanier, Margolis, Harris, Blackmore, Seligman, and Gopnik. I'm going to suggest to Brockman for 2006, "What would it take for you to reverse your three most cherished beliefs?" Happy Gregorian calendar new year! ------------ The World Question Center 2005 http://edge.org/q2005/q05_easyprint.html ______________________________________________________________________ "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" ______________________________________________________________________ God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap: Fourteen scientists ponder everything from string theory to true love. Space Without Time, Time Without Rest: John Brockman's Question for the Republic of Wisdom--It can be more thrilling to start the New Year with a good question than with a good intention. That's what John Brockman is doing for the eight time in a row. What do you believe to be true, even though you can't prove it? John Brockman asked over a hundred scientists and intellectuals... more? ... Edge Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? ______________________________________________________________________ The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a "who's who" of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words. The New York Times ("Science Times") and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("Feuilliton") have been granted rights to publish excepts in their print and online editions simultaneously with Edge publication. The editors of "Science Times" and "Feuilliton", respectively, are making their own selections. The Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore will follow on Sunday, January 9th. This year there's a focus on consciousness, on knowing, on ideas of truth and proof. If pushed to generalize, I would say it is a commentary on how we are dealing with the idea of certainty. We are in the age of "searchculture", in which Google and other search engines are leading us into a future rich with an abundance of correct answers along with an accompanying na?ve sense of certainty. In the future, we will be able to answer the question, but will we be bright enough to ask it? This is an alternative path. It may be that it's okay not to be certain, but to have a hunch, and to perceive on that basis. There is also evidence here that the scientists are thinking beyond their individual fields. Yes, they are engaged in the science of their own areas of research, but more importantly they are also thinking deeply about creating new understandings about the limits of science, of seeing science not just as a question of knowing things, but as a means of tuning into the deeper questions of who we are and how we know. It may sound as if I am referring to a group of intellectuals, and not scientists. In fact, I refer to both. In 1991, I suggested the idea of a third culture, which "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. " I believe that the scientists of the third culture are the pre-eminent intellectuals of our time. But I can't prove it. Happy New Year! John Brockman Publisher & Editor ______________________________________________________________________ This year's Edge Question was suggested by Nicholas Humphrey. ______________________________________________________________________ CONTRIBUTORS ______________________________________________________________________ [280]IAN McEWAN Novelist; Author, Saturday [mcewan100.jpg] What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given--true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound. |[281]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [282]ROBERT TRIVERS Evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University; Author, Natural Selection and Social Theory [trivers100.jpg] Think true, cannot prove. I believe that deceit and self deception play a disproportinate role in human-generated disasters, including misguided wars, international affairs more gnerally, the collapse of civilizations, and state affairs, including disastrous social, political and economic policies and miscarriages of justice. I believe deceit and self deception play an important role in the relative underdevelopment of the social sciences. I believe that processes of self deception are important in limiting the achievement of individuals. |[283]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [284]IAN WILMUT Biologist; Cloning Researcher; Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; Coauthor, The Second Creation [Wilmut100.jpg] I believe that it is possible to change adult cells from one phenotype to another. The birth of Dolly provided the insight behind this belief. She was the first adult cloned from another adult, of any species. Previously biologists had believed that the mechanisms that direct the formation of all of the different tissues that make up an adult were so complex and so rigidly fixed that they could not be reversed. Her birth demonstrated that the mechanisms that were active in the nucleus transferred from the mammary epithelial cell could be reversed by unknown factors in the recipient unfertilised egg. We take for-granted the process by which the single cell embryo at fertilisation gives rise to all of the many tissues of an adult. As almost all of those cells have the same genetic information, the changes must be brought about by sequential differences in function of the genes. An impression is beginning to emerge of the factors that bring about these sequential changes, although much more remains to be learned. In particular, very little is known of the hierarchy of influence of the several regulatory factors. I believe that a greater understanding of these mechanisms will allow us to cause cells from one tissue to form another different tissue. We have long been accustomed to the idea that cells are influenced by their external environment and use specific methods of tissue culture to control their function in the laboratory. The new research introduces an additional dimension. We will learn how to increase the activity of the intracellular factors to achieve our aims. This may be by direct introduction of the proteins, use of small molecule drugs to modulate expression of regulatory genes or transient expression of those key genes. We have much to learn about the optimal approach to transdifferentiation. Is it necessary to reverse the process of differentiation to an early stage in the same pathway? Or is it possible to achieve change directly from one path to another? The answer may vary from one tissue to another. The medical implications will be profound. Cells of specific tissues will be available from patients either for research to understand genetic differences or for their therapy, This is not to suggest that we cease research on embryo stem cells because knowledge from their use will be essential to develop the new approaches that I envisage. Conversely, understanding of the mechanisms of reprogramming cells will create important new opportunities in the use of embryo stem cells. As many options as possible should be available to the researcher and clinician. It is my belief that, ultimately, this approach to tissue formation will be the greatest inheritance of the Dolly experiment. The ramifications are far wider than those that involve the production of cloned offspring. |[285]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [286]ANTON ZEILINGER [zeilinger100.jpg] What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality. The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information. In other words, whenever we make any statement about the world, about any object, about any feature of any object, we always make statements about the information we have. And, whenever we make scientific predictions we make statements about information we possibly attain in the future. So one might be tempted to believe that everything is just information. The danger there is solipsism and subjectivism. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there is reality out there. For me the strongest argument for a reality independent of us is the randomness of the individual quantum event, like the decay of a radioactive atom. There is no hidden reason why a given atom decays at the very instant it does so. So if reality exists and if we will never be able to make an operational distinction between reality and information, the hypothesis suggests itself that reality and information are the same. We need a new concept which encompasses both. In a sense, reality and information are the two sides of the same coin. I feel that this is the message of the quantum. It is the natural extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Once you adopt the notion that reality and information are the same all quantum paradoxes and puzzles disappear, like the measurement problem or Schr?dinger's cat. Yet the price to pay is high. If my hypothesis is true, many questions become meaningless. There is no sense then to ask, what is "really" going on out there. Schr?dinger's cat is neither dead nor alive unless we obtain information about her state. By the way, I also believe that some day all computers will be quantum computers. The reason I believe this is the ongoing miniaturization of electronic components. And, certainly, we will learn to overcome decoherence. We will learn how to observe quantum phenomena outside the shielded environment of laboratories. I hope I will still be alive when this happens. |[287]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [288]JARED DIAMOND Biologist; Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse [diamond100.jpg] When did humans complete their expansion around the world? I'm convinced, but can't yet prove, that humans first reached the continents of North America, South America, and Australia only very recently, at or near the end of the last Ice Age. Specifically, I'm convinced that they reached North America around 14,000 years ago, South America around 13,500 years ago, and Australia and New Guinea around 46, 000 years ago; and that humans were then responsible for the extinctions of most of the big animals of those continents within a few centuries of those dates; and that scientists will accept this conclusion sooner and less reluctantly for Australia and New Guinea than for North and South America. Background to my conjecture is that there are now hundreds of thousands of sites with undisputed evidence of human presence dating back to millions of years ago in Africa, Europe, and Asia, but none with even disputed evidence of human presence over 100,000 years ago in the Americas and Australia. In the Americas, undisputed evidence suddenly appears in all the lower 48 U.S. states around 14,000 years ago, at numerous South American sites soon thereafter, and at hundreds of Australian sites between 46,000 and 14,000 years ago. Evidence of most of the former big mammals of those continents--e.g., elephants and lions and giant ground sloths in the Americas, giant kangaroos and one-ton Komodo dragons in Australia--disappears within a few centuries of those dates. The transparent conclusion: people arrived then, quickly filled up those continents, and easily killed off their big animals that had never seen humans and that let humans walk up to them, as Galapagos and Antarctica animals still do today. But some Australian archaeologists, and many American archaeologists, resist this obvious conclusion, for several reasons. Archaeologists try hard to find convincing earlier sites, because it would be a dramatic discovery. Every year, discoveries of many purportedly older sites are announced, then to be forgotten. As the supporting evidence dissolves or remains disputed, we're now in a steady state of new claims and vanishing old claims, like a hydra constantly sprouting new heads. There are still a few sites known for the Americas with evidence of human butchering of the extinct big animals, and none known for Australia and New Guinea--but one expects to find very few sites anyway, among all the sites of natural deaths for hundreds of thousands of years, if the hunting was all finished locally (because the prey became extinct) within a few decades. American archaeologists are especially persistent in their quest for pre-14,000 sites--perhaps because secured dating requires use of multiple dating techniques (not just radiocarbon), but American archaeologists distrust alternatives to radiocarbon (discovered by U.S. scientists) because the alternative dating techniques were discovered by Australian scientists. Every year, beginning graduate students in archaeology and paleontology, working in Africa or Europe or Asia, go out and discover undisputed new sites with ancient human presence. Every year, new such discoveries are announced to the other three continents, but none has ever met the requirements of evidence accepted for Africa, Europe, or Asia. The big animals of the latter three continents survive, because they had millions of years to learn fear of human hunters with very slowly evolving skills; most big animals of the former three continents didn't survive, because they had the misfortune that their first encounter with humans was a sudden one, with fully modern skilled hunters. To me, the case is already proved. How many more decades of unconvincing claims will it take to convince the holdouts among my colleagues? I don't know. It makes better newspaper headlines to report "Wow!! New discovery overturns the established paradigm of American archaeology!!" than to report, "Ho hum, yet another reportedly paradigm-overturning discovery fails to hold up." |[289]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [290]DANIEL GOLEMAN Psychologist; Author, Emotional Intelligence [goleman100.jpg] I believe, but cannot prove, that today's children are unintended victims of economic and technological progress. To be sure, greater wealth and advanced technology offers all of us better lives in many ways. Yet these unstoppable forces seem to have had some disastrous results in how they have been transforming childhood. Even as children's IQs are on a steady march upward over the last century, the last three decades have seen a major drop in children's most basic social and emotional skills--the very abilities that would make them effective workers and leaders, parents and spouses, and members of the community. Of course there are always individual exceptions--children who grow up to be outstanding human beings. But the Bell Curve for social and emotional abilities seems to be sliding in the wrong direction. The most compelling data comes from a random national sample of more than 3,000 American children ages seven to sixteen--chosen to represent the entire nation--rated by their parents and teachers, adults who know them well. First done in the early 1970s, and then roughly fifteen years later, in the mid-80s, and again in the late 1990s, the results showed a startling decline. The most precipitous drop occurred between the first and second cohorts: American children were more withdrawn, sulky and unhappy, anxious and depressed, impulsive and unable to concentrate, delinquent and aggressive. Between the early 1970s and the mid-80s, they did more poorly on 42 indicators, better on none. In the late 1990s, scores crept back up a bit, but were nowhere near as high as they had been on the first round, in the early 70s. That's the data. What I believe, but can't prove, is that this decline is due in large part to economic and technological forces. For one, the ratcheting upward of global competition means that over the last two decades or so each generation of parents has had to work longer to maintain the same standard of living that their own parents had--virtually every family has two working parents today, while 50 years ago the norm was only one. It's not that today's parents love their children any less, but that they have less free time to spend with them than was true in their parents' day. Increasing mobility means that fewer children live in the same neighborhood as their extended families--and so no longer have surrogate parenting from close relatives. Day care can be excellent, particularly for children of privileged families, but too often means less well-to-do children get too little caring attention in their day. For the middle class, childhood has become overly organized, a tight schedule of dance or piano lessons and soccer games, children shuttled from one adult-run activity to another. This has eroded the free time in which children can play together on their own, in their own way. When it comes to learning social and emotional skills, I suspect the lessoning of open time with family, relatives and other children translates into a loss of the very activities that have traditionally allowed the natural transmission of these skills. Then there's the technological factor. Today's children spend more time than ever in human history alone, staring at a video monitor. That amounts to a natural experiment in childrearing on an unprecedented scale. While this may mean children as adults will be more at ease with their computers, I doubt it does anything but de-skill them when it comes to relating to each other person-to-person. We know that the prefrontal-limbic neural circuitry crucial for social and emotional abilities is the last part of the human brain to become anatomically mature, not finishing this developmental task until the mid-20s. During that window, children's life abilities become set as neurons come online and are interconnected for better or for worse. A child's experiences dictate how those connections are made. A smart strategy for helping every child get the right social and emotional skill-building would be to bring such lessons into the classroom rather than leaving it to chance. My hunch, which I can't prove, is that this offers the best way to keep children from paying of modern life for us all. |[291]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [292]MARTI HEARST Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems [hearst100.jpg] The Search Problem is solvable. Advances in computational linguistics and user interface design will eventually enable people to find answers to any question they have, so long as the answer is encoded in textual form and stored in a publicly accessible location. Advances in reasoning systems will to a limited degree be able to draw inferences in order to find answers that are not explicitly present in the existing documents. There have been several recent developments that prompt me to make this claim. First, computational linguistics (also known as natural language processing or language engineering) has made great leaps forward in the last decade, due primarily to advances stemming from the availability of huge text collections, from which statistics can be derived. Today's automatic language translation systems, for example, are now derived almost entirely from statistical patterns extracted from text collections. They now work as well as hand-engineered systems, and promise to continue to improve. As another example, recent government-sponsored research in the area of (simple) question answering has produced a radical leap forward in the quality of results in this arena. Of course, another important development is the rise of the Web and its most voracious consumer, the internet search engine. It is common knowledge that search engines make use of information associated with link structure to improve results rankings. But search engine companies also have enormous, albeit somewhat impoverished, repositories of information about how people ask for information. This behavioral information can be used to build better search tools. For example, some spelling correction algorithms make use of how people have corrected erroneous spellings in the past, by observing pairs of queries that occur one after the next. The second query is assumed to be the correction, if it is sufficiently similar to the first. Patterns are then derived that convert from different types of misspellings to their corrections. Another development in the field of computational linguistics is the manual creation of enormous lexical ontologies, which are then used to build axioms and rules about language use. These modern ontologies, unlike their predecessors, are of a large enough scale and simple enough design to be useful, although this work is in the early stages. There are also many attempts to build such ontologies automatically from large text collections; the most promising approach seems to be to combine the automated and the manual approaches. As a side note, I am skeptical about the hype surrounding the Semantic Web--it is very difficult to characterize concepts in a systematic way, and even more so to force all the world's creators of information to conform to one schema. Automated analysis tools adapt to what people really do, rather than try to force people's expressions of information to conform to a standard. Finally, advances in user interface design are key to producing better search results. The search field has learned an enormous amount in the ten years since the Web became a major presence in society, but as is often noted in the field, the interface itself hasn't changed much: after all this time, we still type words into a blank box and then select from a list of results. Experience shows that a search interface has to be a qualitative leap better than the standard in order to entice people to switch. I believe headway will be made in this area, most likely occurring in tandem with advances in natural language analysis. It may well be the case that advances in audio, image, and video processing will keep pace with those of language analysis, thus making possible the answering of questions that can be answered by information stored in graphical and audio form. However, my expertise does not extend to these fields, so I will not make a claim about this. |[293]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [294]TIMOTHY TAYLOR Archaeologist, University of Bradford; Author, The Buried Soul [taylor100.jpg] "All your life you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque" wrote Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Something I believe is true even though I cannot prove it, is that both cannibalism and slavery were prevalent in human prehistory. Neither belief commands specialist academic consensus and each phenomenon remains highly controversial, their empirical "signatures" in the archaeological record being ambiguous and fugitive. Truth and belief are uncomfortable words in scholarship. It is possible to define as true only those things that can be proved by certain agreed criteria. In general, science does not believe in truth or, more precisely, science does not believe in belief. Understanding is understood as the best fit to the data under the current limits (both instrumental and philosophical) of observation. If science fetishized truth, it would be religion, which it is not. However, it is clear that under the conditions that Thomas Kuhn designated as " normal science" (as opposed to the intellectual ferment of paradigm shifts) most scholars are involved in supporting what is, in effect, a religion. Their best guesses become fossilized as a status quo, and the status quo becomes an item of faith. So when a scientist tells you that "the truth is . . .", it is time to walk away. Better to find a priest. Until recently, most archaeologists would be inclined to say that the truths about cannibalism and about slavery are that each has been sharply historically limited and that each is a more or less aberrant cultural phenomenon. The reason for such a belief is that it is only in a small number of cases that either thing be proved beyond reasonable doubt. But I see the problem in the starting point. If we shift our background expectations and say that coercing a living person to do one's bidding is perhaps the very first form of property ownership ("the slavery latent in the family" to use Marx and Engels' telling phrase), and that eating the dead (as very many wild vertebrates do) makes sense in nutritional and competitive terms, then the archaeologist's duty is to empirically establish those times and places where slavery and cannibalism had ceased to exist. The only reason we have hitherto insisted on proof-positive rather than proof-negative in relation to these phenomena is that both seem grotesque to us now, and we have rather a high opinion of our natural civility. This is the most interesting point, and the focus of my attention is how culturally-elaborated mechanisms of restraint and inter-personal respect emerged and allowed such refined scruples. |[295]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [296]RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D. Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick [nesse100.jpg] I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations. I am not advocating for irrationality or extreme emotionality. Many, perhaps even most problems of individuals and groups arise from actions based on passion. The Greek initiators and Enlightenment implementers recognized correctly that the world would be better off if reason displaced superstition and crude emotion. I have no interest in going back on that road and fundamentalism remains a severe threat to enlightened civilization. I am arguing, however, that if we want to understand these tendencies we need to quit dismissing them as defects and start considering how they came to exist. I came to this belief from seeing psychiatric patients while studying game theory and evolutionary biology. Many patients are consumed by fears, sadness, and other emotions they find painful and senseless. Others are crippled by grandiose fantasies or bizarre beliefs. On the other side are those with obsessive compulsive personality. They do not have obsessive compulsive disorder; they do not wash and count all day. They have obsessive compulsive personality characterized by hyper-rationality. They are mystified by other people's emotional outbursts. They do their duty and expect others will too. They are often disappointed in this, giving rise to frequent resentment if not anger. They trade favors according to the rules, and they can't fathom genuine generosity or spiteful hatred. People who lack passions suffer several disadvantages. When social life results in situations that can be mapped onto game theory, regular predictable behavior is a strategy inferior to allocating actions randomly among the options. The angry person who might seek spiteful revenge is a force to be reckoned with, while a sensible opponent can be easily dealt with. The passionate lover sweeps away a superior but all too practical offer of marriage. It is harder to explain the disadvantages suffered by people who lack a capacity for faith, but consider the outcomes for those who wait for proof before acting, compared to the those who act on confident conviction. The great things in life are done by people who go ahead when it seems senseless to others. Usually they fail, but sometimes they succeed. Like nearly every other trait, tendencies for passionate emotions and irrational convictions are most advantageous in some middle range. The optimum for modern life seems to me to be quite a ways towards the rational side of the median, but there are advantages and disadvantages at every point along the spectrum. Making human life better requires that we understand these capacities, and to do that we must seek their origins and functions. I cannot prove this is true, but I believe it is. This belief spurs my search for evidence which will either strengthen my conviction or, if I can discipline my mind sufficiently, convince me that it is false. |[297]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [298]STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER Biologist; Climatologist, Stanford University; Author, Laboratory Earth [Schneider100.jpg] I believe that global warming is both a real phenomenon and at least partially a result of human activities such as dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In fact I can "prove it"--or can I?--that is the real question. What is "proof"? In the strict old fashioned frequentist statistical belief system data is direct observations of the hypothesized phenomena--temperature increases in my case--and when you get enough of it to produce frequency distributions you can assign objective probabilities to cause and effect hypotheses. But what if the events cannot be precisely measured, or worse, apply to future events like the warming of the late 21st century? Then a frequentist interpretation of " proof" is impossible in principle before the fact, and we instead become subjectivists--Bayesian updaters as some statisticians like to refer to it. In this case we use frequency data and all other data relevant to components of our analysis to form a "prior"--a belief about likelihood of an event or process. Then as we learn more we update our belief--an "a posteriori probability" as the Bayesians call it--or simply a revised prior. It is my strong belief that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to form a subjective prior with high confidence that the earth's surface has warmed over the past century about 0.7 deg C or so and that at least half of the more recent warming is traceable to human pressures. Is this " proof" of anthropogenic (i.e., we did it) warming? Not in the strict sense of a criminal trial with "beyond a reasonable doubt" criterion--say a 99% objective probability. But in the sense of a civil proceeding, where " preponderance of evidence" is the standard and a likelihood much greater than 50% is adequate to have a case, then global warming is indeed already " proved". So as a frequentist I concede I believe it is real without full "proof", but as a subjectivist, my reading of the many lines of evidence puts global warming well over the minimum thresholds of belief to assert it is already "proved". |[299]back to contents| ______________________________________________________________________ [300]BRIAN GOODWIN Biologist, Schumacher College, Devon, UK; Author, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots [goodwin100.jpg] Nature Is Culture. I believe that nature and culture can now be understood as one unified process, not two distinct domains separated by some property of humans such as written or spoken language, consciousness, or ethics. Although there is no proof of this, and no consensus in the scientific community or in the humanities, the revelations of the past few years provide a foundation for both empirical and conceptual work that I believe will lead to a coherent, unified perspective on the process in which we and nature are engaged. This is not a take-over of the humanities by science, but a genuine fusion of the two based on clear articulations of basic concepts such as meaning and wholeness in natural and cultural processes, with implications for scientific studies, their applications in technology and their expression in the arts. For me this vision has arisen primarily through developments in biology, which occupies the middle ground between culture and the physical world. The key conceptual changes have arisen from complexity theory through detailed studies of the networks of interactions between components within organisms, and between them in ecosystems. When the genome projects made it clear that we are unable to make sense of the information in DNA, attention necessarily shifted to understanding how organisms use this in making themselves with forms that allow them to survive and reproduce in particular habitats. The focus shifted from the hereditary material to its organised context, the living cell, so that organisms as agencies with a distinctive kind of organisation returned to the biological foreground. Examination of the self-referential networks that regulate gene activities in organisms, that carry out the diverse functions and constructions within cells through protein-protein interactions (the proteome), and the sequences of metabolic transformations that make up the metabolome, have revealed that they all have distinctive properties of self-similar, fractal structure governed by power-law relationships. These properties are similar to the structure of languages, which are also self-referential networks described by power-laws, as discovered years ago by G.K. Zipf. A conclusion is that organisms use proto-languages to make sense of both their inherited history (written in DNA and its molecular modifications) and their external contexts (the environment) in the process of making themselves as functional agencies. Organisms thus become participants in cultures with histories that have meaning, expressed in the forms (morphologies and behaviours) distinctive to their species. This is of course embodied or tacit meaning, which cognitive scientists now recognise as primary in human culture also. Understanding species as cultures that have experienced 3.7 billion years of adaptive evolution on earth makes it clear that they are repositories of meaningful knowledge and experience about effective living that we urgently need to learn about in human culture. Here is a source of deep wisdom about living in participation with others that is energy and resource efficient, that recycles everything, produces forms that are simultaneously functional and beautiful, and is continuously innovative and creative. We can now proceed with a holistic science that is unified with the arts and humanities and has at its foundation the principles that arise from a naturalistic ethic based on an extended science that includes qualities as well as quantities within the domain of knowledge. There is plenty of work to do in articulating this unified perspective, from detailed empirical studies of the ways in which organisms achieve their states of coherence and adaptability to the application of these principles in the organic design of all human artefacts, from energy-generating devices and communication systems to cars and factories. The goal is to make human culture as integrated with natural process as the rest of the living realm so that we enhance the quality of the planet instead of degrading it. This will require a rethinking of evolution in terms of th