In the final tally, it’s easier to understand the physiology of disease than it is to arrive at a clear-eyed view of what disease means. This is all the more true of mental diseases, where the symptoms are less overt and often less clear-cut, and hence where the promise of imposing order through a physiology of the mind is all the more seductive. We strive to give mental illness a meaning by giving it a biological meaning, by showing that it has some adaptive function. Oftentimes this is an attempt to see behind one’s illness the workings of a higher power: you treat excessive melancholy as a kind of finely-tuned sensory power–the fact that you are so sad is supposed to tell you something about your larger situation, for example that you have some pressing problem you need to withdraw from the world in order to analyze. This may well be true, but even if it is what does it mean? It can perhaps interrupt a spiral of self-loathing where the depressed feels even worse for being on top of it all a malfunctioning member of the species. But this isn’t really to give depression a meaning. At most it clears away one of the illusory meanings, spiritual-cum-biological pollution, that has historically been attached to it. Whether excessive melancholy is good or bad is not settled by biology. We could recognize its burdens even when our science was still primitive. Similarly, the ultimate accounting of the costs and benefits of melancholy in its more moderate forms cannot be reckoned in biological terms.
(Courtesy of Colin Burnett under a Creative Commons License)
Large-animal trainers, together with mountain climbers, astronauts, and certain X-treme sportspeople, have the rare, but not necessarily desirable privilege of dying fully intelligible deaths. There is shock and grief as always, a search for ‘what went wrong,’ but no real mystery, no sense of chaos in the world, not, at least, beyond the brain-scrambling pain of personal bonds severed too soon. Admirers and critics alike say ‘really, what else could we expect given the nature of their chosen pursuits?’ Here death steps out of its normal role: it doesn’t refute what we already know–it confirms it. This is not just an actuarial matter of the mathematical risks being unusually high or something. It’s more that death, if it still lives anywhere in the rational, padded world, lives on mountaintops, in the almost electric field around intelligent, dangerous animals, and on top of rockets going 18,000 miles an hour. There are almost certainly statistically more dangerous activities, but few in which the dangerous element is so concentrated and primal, and fewer still in which the greater, more outrageous and criminal the danger, the more they seem worth doing.
The official US motto ‘In God We Trust’ is of relatively recent origin. It appeared on US coins only during the Civil War, when an upwelling of Christian sentiment also led to the proposal of a Christian Amendment, and on paper money only beginning in 1957!
Soviet-era temperance literature:
Jesus as moonshiner
We probably domesticated rye unintentionally. Thanks Vavilovian mimicry!!
Kelp-buoyed boats of the Chatham Islands.
Great, detailed article on the Civilian Public Service set up for Quakers, Mennonites, and other ‘historic peace churches’ during WWII. They were sort of like the CCC but also staffed mental hospitals and served as medical test subjects. Interesting tidbit:
As the war progressed, a critical shortage of workers in psychiatric hospitals developed, because staff had left for better paying jobs with fewer hours and improved working conditions. … The government balked at initial requests that CPS workers have these positions, believing it better to keep the men segregated in the rural camps to prevent the spread of their philosophy.
William James–has our continent produced a more sensitive philosophical mind?–made in 1880 an important point underappreciated even now, namely that Darwinism means you have to distinguish between why trait is preserved by the environment and how it was produced in the first place:
If we look at an animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be able to discriminate between the causes which originally produced the peculiarity in him and the causes that maintain it after it is produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant cycles. It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and to act accordingly. Separating the causes of production under the title of ‘tendencies to spontaneous variation,’ and relegating them to a physiological cycle which he forthwith agreed to ignore altogether, he confined his attention to the causes of preservation, and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment. (emphasis James’s)
(from ‘Great Men and Their Environment‘)
James’s distinction shows why it’s maximally misleading to speak, even semi-facetiously, of natural selection ‘designing’ or ‘wanting’ organisms to do things, a point I was trying to make in an earlier post, ‘The evolved mind.’ When you think of something as designed, even by a ‘blind watchmaker’, the distinction between production and maintenance doesn’t really arise: hammers are produced to pound nails and hammers are still around–we haven’t moved on to something else–because they really do pound nails. They are produced by an intention, namely nail-p0unding, and persist so long as they continue to fulfill that intention. Whether a hammer is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a simple matter: does it pound nails? It’s pretty easy, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, for us to wrap our minds around this. But inevitably, this means that talking about natural selection as, for example, ‘a blind watchmaker’, as Richard Dawkins does, triggers the thought that what goes for hammers goes for organisms: if not consciously designed, organisms are still produced in order to survive and procreate. From there it’s a small step to the conclusion that whether a trait is ’good’ or ‘bad’ is answered by the simple question of whether it furthers survival/procreation. But this line of thought is confused from the beginning. Traits are preserved because of their survival/procreation-value, not produced by it, even unconsciously.
Since olden times philosophers and those calling themselves philosophers have self-aggrandized in public and self-medicated in private by repeating the Platonic mantra that the unexamined life is not worth living. Like all good PR, this slogan creates a sort of negative space–note the dual negativizers ‘un-’ and ‘not’– into which you can throw all your vague ideas about just what the examined life actually is and what actually makes life worthwhile, all while everyone else does exactly the same with vague ideas of their own. Like all good advertising, it holds out a promise to you–YOU!–that your own personal existence will get better, more meaningful if only you’ll turn on your mind and drag out those inchoate ideas you’ve been accumulating on your mental periphery.
Astra Taylor’s documentary ‘Examined Life‘ (streamable on Netflix, btw) is a series of brief talking head interviews with prominent philosophers conducted on the move. They expound in cars, in rowboats, on airport moving sidewalks, in parks, on busy streets, and in front of large piles of trash. They are out in the real world, among the people, taking it to the streets. That’s the premise, I guess, and the movie consciously plays up the incongruity of it all: pure mind plopped down in the middle of a messy world of which it’s the last, best hope. Thus we get Cornel West, a man who dresses like he should be hailing a horse-drawn hackney carriage, riding in the back of car. We get Peter Singer amid the high-fashion carnival of Times Square wearing utilitarian gray and speaking in the most measured monotone . We get Avital Ronnell dressed like she’s from the Chinese future strolling by schlubby, bewildered New Yorkers. Meanwhile, Michael Hardt, voice of the global multitude, takes an aristocratic-seeming boat cruise, and Kwame Anthony Appiah wanders around an eerily deserted airport looking rather lonely. Ideas certainly do belong in the world, but in order to make this conclusion dramatic the movie thinks it has to first play up the silly thought they and the people who think them up ever came from anywhere else.
The best and rarest moments are when the subjects break character, stop being pedants, and talk less at us than with us. Hardt has a funny story about getting absurdly impractical career advice from El Salvadorean guerrillas, as does Appiah about how his Ghanaian father and English mother got together. Fleetingly, seemingly against the filmmakers’ wishes, we see that philosophers are people too, and that some of them are even halfway interesting.
By contrast, one of the most painful moments is when Sunaura Taylor, a disabled rights activist, herself disabled, and the one non-professional philosopher in the movie, struggles to articulate the theoretical distinction between disability and impairment and gets gently but rather smugly corrected by Judith Butler. It’s not cruel or anything but it sort of raises the question of what ultimately the value of theory is. If it gives people a productive way to think about themselves, if it can make the callous more empathetic, great, but it’s nothing to hold over people. I don’t know about unexamined, but the untheorized life is almost certainly still worth living.
By far the weirdest thing about ‘Examined Life’ is that for a movie ostensibly about ideas engaging the world no one ever really does anything beyond basically walk and talk. Hardt crashes his rowboat and S. Taylor and Butler buy a sweater, but that’s it. The rest of the time everyone just sort of floats along leisurely, in the world but not of it. I suppose this might be to show how life-examination can be done anywhere, anytime, and without accessories sold separately, but still. It’s as if simply examining your life were enough by itself: in essence, if the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then clearly all that’s needed to make life worthwhile is a little examination, a little engaged but disembodied thought or, as certain philosophers like to say, interrogation. But a) you need to act well as well as think well, and b) thinking is easy, thinking well is the hard part. It’s what matters and based on the documentary evidence it’s not clear that professional philosophers are in any meaningful way better at this than others. This is, as it were, the fine print under Plato’s timeworn slogan.
Given that there is entirely too much hysteria attached to the word ‘terrorist’ and that far too much of that is attached specifically to the dark-skinned, non-Christian demographic, it’s probably not very productive to get too invested in the debate about whether Joseph Stack, the anti-tax terrorist (manifesto here)who crashed his plane into an IRS office in Austin killing one (besides himself) and injuring thirteen, was or was not a terrorist. Regardless of whether or not Stack himself was a terrorist, the indisputable facts are these: 1) there certainly are white-skinned, Christian terrorists and 2) we should be on guard against the very real tendency to downplay terrorist, borderline terrorist, and plain-old despicable acts when the person looks and talks more like Middle America.
However. Even if you agree to dispense with the word ‘terrorist’ and the reflex hyperventilation that comes along with it, you still need to classify different cases differently–race, religion, and nationality are just, everyone should agree, the wrong ways to do it. (Appallingly, not everyone agrees even on this, but that’s a separate issue.) It’s also, for a different reason, wrong to classify violent fearmongers as either personally or politically motivated, terrorists, the thought goes, always and only being politically motivated. The put-upon worker who finally goes postal (see Milton in Office Space) is, of course, personally, not politically motivated. But it’s hard to find anyone who is just politically motivated, for whom there is no relevant personal history that in some way explains their ideological commitments, and it gets even harder as the politics in question get more and more radical. After 9/11 the marketplace was flooded with books and movies that sought to explain the radical politics of al Qaeda types in terms of their personal humiliations. If Stack should be ranked below sundry jihadis on the badness scale, it’s not just because he was acting out of personal grievances on some level deserving of sympathy. So, in all likelihood, were they.
Like Atta and McVeigh, Stack had a political agenda which he sought to advance through violence and fear by attacking civilians. But even within the ranks of the politically motivated violent fearmongers, there are important distinctions to be drawn. This goes beyond the relatively small scale of his attack. Stack was not, so far as we know, allied to a larger terrorist movement, though, sadly, he may yet get his wish and inspire one after his death. Nor was he allied to a terrorist movement with the real (but often overestimated) potential to commit acts of large-scale murder. None of this is to excuse him as not-a-terrorist or, what comes to the same thing, not-one-of-those-terrorists. The whole terrorist vs. not-a-terrorist thing is just a crude way to look at cases that need to be placed rationally and dispassionately along a finely graduated scale.
Salvador Dali, by Carl van Vechten
This essay by Orwell on Salvador Dali is one of the most intelligent pieces of art criticism I’ve read. It’s especially remarkable because it’s so naive. Orwell is, by his own admission, writing without any specialized knowledge of the art involved. Key sentences:
Perhaps they [i.e., Dali's 'aberrations'] are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.’ This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, ‘long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.’ And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic representational style of drawing, your real MÉTIER to be an illustrator of scientific books. How do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS.
He thinks Dali was a weird combination of the extremely perverse and the extremely banal.
George Orwell
There has to be some connection between torture and prison rape. They show a society that cannot look its enemies, foreign or domestic, in the eye. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Addington should be held to account for authorizing torture, but the problem of torture goes beyond them. It extends to domestic prisons in which rape is treated as unpreventable, not even worth preventing, as de facto just.
Large segments of America believe that however badly our own citizens are treated in prison, foreign terrorists should be treated worse. Hence the outcry over moving Guantanamo detainees to the homeland. The sentiment is based not on any half-way rational assessment of the security risks, but rather on a sense that those men deserve something beyond our native prisons. But when our own prison system cannot even allow prisoners the dignity of going unraped, how much worse must we treat ‘enemy combatants’?
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has recommended (full report) that Jay Bybee and John Yoo be disciplined for authorizing torture. They won’t be though, because a Justice Department higher-up released a memo concurrent with the OPR report clearing Yoo and Bybee of any wrongdoing. It will be a long, long time before we come to grips with torture. This goes beyond just punishing the guilty, but it starts there.
Going back over some of the pieces Mark Danner wrote about torture during the Bush years, I was struck by this analysis of the political logic behind it:
…if “taking the gloves off” was a critical part of the “great success story” that has “kept the country safe,” then those who put the gloves on—Democrats who, in the wake of the Watergate scandal during the mid-1970s, passed laws that, among other things, limited the president’s freedom to order, with “deniability,” the CIA to operate outside the law—must have left the country vulnerable. And if by passing those restrictive laws three decades ago Democrats had left the country defenseless before the September 11 terrorists, then putting the gloves back on, as President Barack Obama on assuming office immediately began to do, risks leaving the country vulnerable once more.
Thus another successful attack, if it comes, can be laid firmly at the door of the Obama administration and its Democratic, “legalistic” policies.
Torture is demonstrably ineffective as technique either of interrogation or of intimidation, but once you put it on the table, it changes the whole political narrative. If you torture and there are no successful terrorist attacks, great, you’re heroes. If you torture and there are successful terrorist attacks, well, it’s not your fault, you did everything you could. In fact, you gave a fuller measure of devotion because you sacrificed your moral dignity, you did unspeakable things, all to keep Americans safe.
Of course, if you don’t torture and there are no attacks, you just got lucky. And if, heaven forbid, there are attacks, then, well, we all know why, don’t we?
Terror, the very idea, brings out fear, and fear brings out the atavistic in us. There’s something tribal or religious in the logic of torture. Not just that it’s barbaric and brutal and stupid, but that on some level it’s about sacrifice. The movements of al Qaeda can seem to us just as mysterious and inscutable and fearsome as the movements of heavenly bodies seemed to Aztecs or Druids. They sought to control these movements through the sacrifice of innocents. That these are terrible acts is part of the point–the idea is that they wouldn’t be so effective if they weren’t. Something similar may be true, on some level, of our state-sponsored torture. Part of the political point is that it’s terrible. We think, atavistically, that there is a web of sympathetic magic in which atrocities are connected to atrocities.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajagendorf25/ / CC BY 2.0
As this New York Times article shows, a lot of the Tea Party movement’s rhetoric is about mind control. Obama, they think, is secretly totalitarian: he wants to control your thoughts without you even realizing it! Electronic surveillance, Acorn, the Federal Reserve—it’s all part of the plan:
It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters — from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.
WorldNetDaily.com trumpets “exclusives” reporting that the Army is seeking “Internment/Resettlement” specialists. On ResistNet.com, bloggers warn that Mr. Obama is trying to convert Interpol, the international police organization, into his personal police force. They call on “fellow Patriots” to “grab their guns.”
Mr. Beck frequently echoes Patriot rhetoric, discussing the possible arrival of a “New World Order” and arguing that Mr. Obama is using a strategy of manufactured crisis to destroy the economy and pave the way for dictatorship.
At recent Tea Party events around the country, these concerns surfaced repeatedly.
In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records. “Twenty years ago that would have been a paranoid statement,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s not anymore.”
One of the movement’s favorite websites, Infowars.com, has the motto “Because there is a war on for your mind.” In sections with names like “Big Brother” and “Police State”, it purports to collect evidence that totalitarianism is on the march.
In itself, this sort of thing is nothing new. The John Birch Society, it’s often pointed out, is a forerunner. Think also of Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove freaking out about fluoridated water. There’s a new irony, though. The Tea Party movement is fueled by media like Fox News, talk radio, blogs, and twitter that exercise their own kind of mind control. Obviously, it’s nothing like The Manchurian Candidate, where the far left secretly controls the far right. And it’s nothing as deliberate, ambitious, or nefarious as what people accuse the government of, but it’s far more real. There’s the oft-mentioned echo chamber effect where people surround themselves with nothing but fellow travelers. There’s also the bumper-sticker effect, where people are bombarded by images stripped of all but the most superficial meaning. Boston tea party! Socialism! Czars! Patriotism! Tyranny vs. Liberty! Any chance of re-investing them with their real significance suffocates instantly under the sheer volume.
