Category Archives: politics

Apr 01 2024
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philosophy, politics, psychology

Hello, My Name Is Villiam

He would be assisting me, he said. He wanted to know the nature of my problem. I had reached him through a troubleshooting algorithm which my computer kicked out in response to any noxious stimulus.

He was obviously not William. His phonemes betrayed him on that account. Certainly, he had been put up to claiming an English name by his employer. I wondered though, if he had been given a choice of English names, because whoever picked a pseudonym with troublesome sounds had an ulterior motive. I was intrigued. I wanted to know, for example, if the choice of a name containing an unpronounceable sound was William’s protest against being made to lie in the first place, or if the sound was chosen by his neo-colonialist employers by way of mocking him each time he mispronounced it. I wanted to know who the mispronunciation served.

It was possible to make a couple of safe deductions without additional facts. From the company’s stand point, the fake name was simply a trick designed to put the provincials at ease. It would have been insulting if it weren’t such a softball. I mean the kind of pitch thrown by the youth minister at a church picnic ballgame, when he suspects that the teenager at bat might currently be “troubled”. The ball’s loft and smooth arc were indulgences usually reserved for recent T-ball graduates. However, in this context, instead of illuminating the batter’s lack of skill, the throw was clearly meant to imply that Jesus loves you and you should just feel free to hit it as hard as you can.

Everyone involved in the conversation was in on the fake name from the beginning, and the move was disarmingly guileless. I wondered if William had understood and endorsed the verbal head pat involved. I concluded that he must’ve known what it was. He was too smart to think that the ploy was the clever sort of lie whose success or failure turned on him convincing somebody that his name was really William. He would have been more cautious in his presentation were that the case. Clever lies required the liar’s commitment, and so some degree of belief in the lie, for the deception to work. A clever lie could suck its teller in to a lifetime of lie maintenance if it was told carelessly. But the suggestion that Villiam was really William was transparently false, and a transparent lie could not convince anyone, nor was it meant to convince. It was for liars who didn’t care whether you believed them or not. That sort of liar sought to stifle their mark with the embarrassment of an obvious falsehood.

Maybe his employer wanted to shut the customer down a little. The call was scripted, so the fewer the extraneous inputs from the client, the smoother it went. Caller pacification might have been William’s primary goal as well. After all, William himself didn’t seem to care about how the name came out of his mouth. He didn’t try for the English “W”. The first phoneme was the proper approximation in Urdu, and he spoke it without inflection or hesitation. Yet, he was not trying to shut the conversation down otherwise. He said he was there to help resolve my computer problem, and he seemed to be telling the truth about that.

There was something about the matter-of-fact tone of his introduction which also suggested a more subtle understanding of the lie’s purpose. When he spoke the English name, I was supposed to feel comforting familiarity in response, but not just familiarity for comfort’s sake. I was supposed to feel familiarity for the sake of order. So what if a lie served as the foundation of our dialog; the one redeeming feature of a lie was its structure – its orderliness. Once things began to fall in line, even if the facts were off, there was a solid form to build upon. A glimpse of bare structure was exactly what a person needed when they were on a helpline trying to restore the function of a device upon the workings of which they were totally dependent, and thoroughly ignorant.

William proceeded to track down the nature of my problem. He read through a script of questions, following one branch or another depending on my responses. As he continued confidently, I began to understand that he must have been a believer in order for real. He was good at his job and a person didn’t get good at that kind of job without having an affinity for the work. I would probably never know what chain of events led him to the helpline job anymore than I would ever find out what name he was given at birth. But I did know that now he called himself William, and that he was trying nevertheless. In the light of those two facts, I saw the outline of his motive. He must have sensed the makings of a more orderly future in his current circumstances. If his clients’ circumstances were as tractable, then he had some reassurance that he was on the right path.

After chipping away at the shape of my problem for almost an hour, he ran out of questions. We had come to the end of his algorithm. Without missing a beat, he cheerfully announced that he was making out a ticket for me. I could not have asked for better confirmation. I was right when I pegged William as a believer in order and a seeker of order. The ticket went to a cabal of anonymous detectives somewhere above William in the org chart. Armed with superior understanding of the system, and a much thicker book of algorithms, they could get to the bottom of any malfunction. When he informed me that he was generating a ticket, his tone reflected his complete faith in the nameless analysts and their methods, which were, after all, simply more powerful iterations of his own method. The system ran on logic, and so, it’s function or malfunction must be logically discernible. He would get back to me with their answer.

An unusually long interval of silence ensued. As the days added up, my pessimism grew apace. I expected my ticket to come back without an answer, if it came back at all. Unlike William, I had never been a believer in order. I understood the attraction. If taken to its logical conclusion, an orderly life may seem synonymous with justice. In the average person’s dreams of a well-ordered life, everybody gets just what they deserve and nothing that they don’t deserve. But unlike justice, order is not beholden to any facts. As the programmers say, even for a faultless system, “garbage in, garbage out”. I knew about the allure of order and its unwholesome consequences because I had seen it in my own family. That is how I could spot its influence on William, and it was why I found his case so alarming.

My great aunt’s bookshelves had an order disorder. Her whole house was orderly, but especially the bookshelves. No books had protruding shreds of paper marking pages of interest. None of the spines or edges of the covers were worn or discolored. The rows were all even. There was no dust on them. There were shelves and shelves of them. The neatness was intimidating, and it took me until junior high school to work up the nerve to take one of the books off its shelf. When I opened it, the spine crackled. There was no sign of wear within. There was no yellowing of the paper nor was there smudged or faded text. It was clear that the book had never been read. The rest of the books were in similar shape.

I never puzzled out why she had all those unread books. Perhaps it was just because bookshelves need books. I never asked for an explanation either. I could not imagine a coherent answer. I was afraid of what else the question might reveal, since the bookshelves were only a little neater than the rest of the house. I didn’t want to know if the incoherence went deeper, though I already had hints that it did.

She did not display the signs of a naturally fastidious character. Neuropsychological tidiness came with negative signs, like aversions to small children and messy animals. She loved small children, and she owned a hound dog who barely qualified as domesticated. It bayed incessantly. It did not recognize any verbal commands, not even acknowledging its own name. If it got out of the house, it would be gone into the woods for several days, returning only when it was starving. At the end of those excursions, it was covered with red dirt and ticks, and it announced itself by scratching on the front door with its muddy claws. She never scolded that dog for any of it. At the same time, she constantly expressed her displeasure with the Cuban immigrants who had settled in her town. Her objection to them centered on their perceived unwillingness to learn English. She had explained to me once that Spanish was a language for Cuba and English was a language for the United States. To her, the Cubans’ intransigence violated a kind of eugenic order. Spanish described Cuban things, and English described American things. It was as if, were the American things described often enough in Spanish, their original nature might be forgotten, and they would become Spanish things, but not real Spanish things, just American knockoffs which poorly approximated the Spanish original. The dog ate leftovers and slept outside on a dog bed. The children ate at a children’s table until they enrolled in college.

My house is a mess. It has always been that way. I attribute the disarray to my own laziness. But I wonder sometimes, while I am trying to straighten up and I am feeling a leaden weariness grow with each stack of papers sorted and put in its proper place, if the condition of my environment is also reactive. A person with a metaphysical devotion to order could not live this way, after all.

When William finally got back to me with the ticket detectives’ findings, he did not sound cheerful anymore. The ticket had generated another ticket, and the 2nd ticket had generated a third. The degree of logical resolution at that level was irresistible. If there was a malfunction discernible by logic, the executors of the 3rd ticket would have found it, and they found nothing. This meant that I had a hardware problem.

The words “hardware problem” came out with all the connotative qualities which his “my name is Villiam” lacked. His voice had a little bit of whine and squeak to it, and he trailed off before he was finished with the 2nd word. He told me that this was goodbye. I would have to bring the device to a different kind of technician. He warned me that this type of technician frequently did not succeed in putting a device back in working order, and even when they did, it was at a great cost. I imagined sitting across from one of those nihilist rodents, steeping in the reek of cigarette smoke and solder flux, as he perfunctorily pushed the on /off button and tapped a couple of the keys labeled with “f” and a number, before pronouncing my machine. William advised me to resign myself to the strong possibility that I would have to replace my device.

I departed a little from William’s advice at that point. Despite everyone’s occasional suspicions, computer programs are made by people, for people. By definition, programs and their problems are understandable, and therefore fixable. Anyone with enough relevant information could solve problems with a diagram. Hardware problems are something else. They are the most incredibly specific things, and they needn’t be understandable in any useful way. A piece of dust conducting electricity outside of the carefully engineered circuits on a chip, or an overheating transistor #10,022 which intermittently flips a zero for a one, are problems with reasons of their own, but not the kind of reasons amenable to William’s methods. Chasing down hardware problems is a fool’s errand. I did not take my computer to the other class of technicians. I carried it right past them to the electronics store’s sales desk. They told me that they could recycle the valuable materials from the broken machine and gave me quite a nice discount for it on a new computer.

I hope William stays with the helpline. I hope that, as part of his quest for an ever more orderly life, he rises in the org chart to join the secondary, or even tertiary cabal of investigators. I hope that, despite his advancement, he continues to call himself William. Because, he is trying something tricky in trying to live an orderly life. Along the way, he will feel the urge, in the name of order, to lie some more. The lies he will need will be the clever kind. He will need to maintain those lies and he will get drawn in to self-deception as a result. He will be tempted on the day that he recognizes his orderly life as something built rather than something discovered, like a collection of unread books. He will be tempted again on the day when he sees through to the source of a leaden weariness which sometimes settles on him in the lull between tickets, and he finds it to be, not the weight of residual, remediable injustices, but the inertia of a truth that he’s been pushing against: All problems, at the very bottom, are hardware problems. A transparent lie, one that he cannot tell himself, will come in handy then.

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Jan 22 2024
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consciousness, philosophy, politics, psychology, racism

Roots

“What are you going to do with that settlement land? Give it to some smelly Arab? He’s just going to plant a few olive trees, build a shack and then squat on it. At least an Israeli is going to do something productive with it!”

We were all little bit drunk.

I am sure the alcohol made it easier for her to say what she really thought. I know it made it easier for the devil in the back of my head to snap up and start talking.

It jumped right into the case.

“Just what I would expect from a fat spoiled brat like this. She has no idea. She’s lived in her upper-middle-class cocoon exclusively and she’s been rendered completely incapable of even imagining what other people might be going through. She has been smothered without her noticing. I can feel your contempt, and I am here to tell you that it is justified. This person is contemptible,” said the little devil.

Experience is our gold coin. We value the activity of consciousness exclusively. Talk of worth comes down to the coin and nothing else. A common currency binds us too, by assuaging doubts about other minds. We can’t know with complete certainty that other people’s experience closely resembles our own, but everyone knows what constitutes a treasure. An inclusive reverence for our shared impetus to open our eyes each morning is circumstantial evidence of common experience. But sometimes circumstantial evidence is practically as good as definitive evidence, just in case, even if things are not exactly as they appear, they might as well be.

Still, it leaves room for doubt, and doubt is there for us. It naps in the back of everyone’s head until it feels the jolt of a dilemma. Then it wakes instantly, ready with an alternative explanation. While other people may not be hell, they are the source of most dilemmas. We bump into each other in pursuit of our experiential needs. Hunger may be impeding your appreciation of a good story, but there is only one piece of bread for the entire audience. It may be too cold to step out of the tent to see the Milky Way without a blanket, but your brother is sleeping under the other half of your only cover.

In effect, we have to leave some coins on the ground at the crash sites in order to get by, with the reasonable expectation that we will find more pennies along our new path. You get to see a child next to you in the audience enjoying his morsel of bread. You can share a peaceful cup of coffee with your brother in the morning. That’s how it is, as long as we believe in the common currency. And here is where the little devil pipes up.

It points out that you really have no way of knowing that the coins falling from the other persons hand are not lead discs painted gold. Sure, they may look exactly like your own coins, from the way they catch the light to the way they bounce off the ground, but it is conceivable that they are just very good fakes.

It is possible that other people’s basic experience is not really the same as our own. They may treat it as though it were, but if you were really able to slip into their skin, you would find their conscious activity impoverished. A host of plausible explanations supports the assertion. Maybe some deity has decreed it so, or at least left it to the afflicted, whose actions or decisions have subsequently merited the defect. As with so many anatomic traits, genes may determine whose experience is gold, and whose is lead. Perhaps certain cultures stunt a person’s capacity for deluxe experience by stomping on any signs of self-expression from an early age.

The sheer quantity of plausible explanations for the low relative worth of other people’s experience supports the truth of the assertion. If we even suspect that it is true that others are dealing in lead coins while we deal in gold, then we must change our terms, given the fundamental value of experience. What is their hunger to ours if our hunger detracts from an appreciation of art which is beyond their capacity? What is their experience of warmth to ours when our warmth permits an appreciation of stars and galaxies, while theirs merely permits sleep?

For consistency’s sake at least, we must treat people according to the relative worth of their experience. It makes sense then, if the richness of another person’s experience seems to be about half (may be 5/8 ?) of our own, then when push comes to shove, we may reasonably eliminate one of them in our favor.

That is what the little devil has to say. Its argument is immediate and concise, with a veneer of wise skepticism. It appeals especially to those who favor right wing political philosophies, and those who have previously been subject to its analysis. The former typically suspect anything promoting equity (the associated subsidy robs its recipient of an opportunity to demonstrate virtue, as they can never know how much they achieved on the basis of their own merits). If experience for some is relatively impoverished, attempts at equity on any front are futile. The devil’s argument fits particularly well with extreme far right political beliefs such as fascism, in which human nature is presumed to be corrupt yet salvageable by virtuous devotion to the nation and its leader. The exalted will be recognizable by their armbands, and the irredeemable, by their tattoos.

It is difficult to see how to derail the argument from experiential poverty once it has built up some steam. It is a self-sustaining argument, and one that is directed toward a single end because, although multiple etiologies are possible the result is the same: a social emulsion of capable and disabled persons which will naturally begin to separate. Those with defects can never understand the greater needs of the whole people. The only reasonable move on the part of the intact is to preempt the natural process of separation by actively separating themselves from the defectives, along with the resources appropriate to the elevated needs of the intact.

The separation needn’t be too gentle either. After all, any suffering experienced by the disabled will necessarily be less than the suffering of the capable under the constraints of the social emulsion. Of course, the defective people won’t take this lying down, and one can expect their response to be no more humane than their disability allows. By this mechanism, the treatment of the whole people by the defectives comes to precisely resemble the treatment of the defectives by the whole people. This convergence can even convince the defectives that the roles have been reversed. After all, the acts licensed to the supposedly intact in the course of separation look just like treatment one might expect from the experientially impoverished in response to, from their perspective, unreasonable demands from the other side.

I don’t know how to shut the devil down. Its argument prevails on the basis of even tiny doubts. An effective inoculation would need to induce tolerance for uncertainty, in each individual, of the uniform value of individual experience. From the Neolithic agricultural revolution to the Industrial Revolution, our species has shown a willingness to exchange large chunks of lifespan for relief of uncertainty. And we are easily induced to doubt other people’s nature when we cannot square their behavior with what we consider human nature. We might not win this one as long as there is more than one of us,

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Jun 28 2022
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biology, medical ethics, philosophy, politics, psychology

This again?

“Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”

Marvin the robot

My day began with a woman on the radio proclaiming a great victory for life. For the first time in a long time, a world in which no unborn child got murdered looked to her like a real possibility. Her statement contained a pile of red hot words, resting on one simple word: life. Let us be as clear as possible about the definition of life, because those who have adopted the label “pro-life” will not be. When they talk about life, they don’t mean to talk about biochemistry, they mean to talk about the soul. They mean to talk about all those little souls, bearing some indefinite relationship to little bundles of cells. Via that bond, the soul somehow sanctifies an embryo, while remaining completely uninvolved with biochemistry. What follows are the familiar discontents of substance dualism.

Like most of the pro-life crowd, the woman on the radio barged past the interaction problem and its implications with loud assertions. I got the sense that she may not have fully appreciated those implications herself, and so the rhetorical bum rush may have been a means of self defense as much as it was an offensive tactic.

Poor insight is no excuse though. She deserves the heap of scorn coming her way. Yet she doesn’t bear sole responsibility for her inconsistency. She no doubt labors under the influence of a defective definition of biology. In school, she probably learned a series of rhetorical tautologies (life is organism, organism is metabolism plus reproduction) in her biology classes which amounted to saying, “life is what biologists study”. Nor is biology unique in that regard. All of the sciences have backfilled their metaphysics.

Yet, the associated metaphysics is what really interests us. Though it is fantastic to know about the microscopic structure of the wood in the ship of Theseus, what we really want to know is not the composition of the planks, but the defining relationships of those boards in context. The planks are the ship of Theseus because they floated around the Aegean trod upon by Greek heroes, not simply because the boards consist of a cellulose polymer capable of floating around the Aegean while being trod upon by Greek heroes.

Life is not the Krebs cycle or the DNA in a blastocyst’s nucleus, and it is certainly not some vital substance wafting about, indefinable in principle, and opaque in its activity. Life is what sustains defining change across circumstances. In other words, it is the fulcrum of a dynamic equilibrium. Consider a bacterium in a nutrient broth. Energy from the broth translates into new molecules like the molecules which came before in the cell wall, ring chromosome, and cytoplasm of the bacterium. Having built up enough substrate, bacterium divides, relaying its balance point on through time and space. Then someone drops an antibiotic into the broth. Energy from the broth stops flowing into new substrate and shifts to the activation of efflux pumps. That’s life.

If the organism is overcome, it becomes adrift in its circumstances. Once its equilibrium gets tipped too far, it cannot make its way through the broth or the antibiotic exposure with its causal explanations intact.It’s molecules react with surrounding molecules based on ambient energy states. It cedes all its explanations to whatever is floating around with it in the broth. It is dead.

Beyond this stark boundary between life and death, lies an expansive liveliness. There is life that sails almost where it will (humans), life within life (Portuguese man of war, bees, lichen), and life explicable only in context (prions, chlamydia, embryos).

Embryos live strictly within the lives of their mothers. Embryo explanations require mothers. Embryo explanations do not require souls. Until someone comes up with an effective description of the soul and its relationship to a little ball of cells latched onto the endometrium, the soul remains an inert addition – an epiphenomenon at best. This is a problem which the pro-life fools can’t shout down or blow past. Because the problem with epiphenomena is that there is nothing really tying them down. They don’t do anything, so they can fill in wherever. The unknowable nature of the zygotic soul can justify whatever, from bombs to prayers. It’s a wonder that something so flimsy could ground a social movement of such size. The truth is though, it doesn’t.

The target of the pro-life movement has always been the women, as one might guess given the nature of trans placental relationship.

The vacuous nature of pro-life rhetoric needs exposure, so that we can get to the real purpose of that rhetoric, which is control. People in the pro-life movement are not really interested in the biology of human development, or even bioethics. Instead, they are interested in other people’s stories. Because their own narratives, jumbled as they are with souls, sins, and angels, are so weak, the pro-lifers see divergent narratives as invalidating. Accordingly, they try to curtail divergent narratives wherever they can.

That is the motivation behind the pro-life movement. I doubt that this motive is ever articulated within the ranks. I suspect it is held more as a feeling, which makes it even more dangerous. A stated policy can be confronted, criticized, and torn down. Opposition to a feeling is personal. Furthermore, feelings tend to take on lives of their own. Clarence Thomas is already telling us what comes of persistent, unleashed insecurity. Listen to him, and the rest, and then call them out.

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Nov 16 2021
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philosophy, politics, psychology, Trump

What about my rights

A society has two basic means to regulate its members’ behavior. It can either entrust them with rights, or restrict them with rules. Each approach has its downside, and most societies use a mix of the two. In China, there are all sorts of rules regarding what you can say and where you can go, but citizens have the right to engage in quite a few economic activities as they see fit. In the United States, you can do what the hell you want, and the law comes knocking after the fact, for the most part.. The problems with rules seem quite obvious, at least to those of us who grew up in liberal Western democracies. Rules are stifling. and the utilization of rules assumes the worst of humans.

Implicit in law, policy, and custom is the notion that people respond best to fear or avarice, and therefore need punishments and rewards. Left to their own devices, they will be unruly. There is a grain of validity in the rule-makers attitude, but it is also the case that people live up to expectations.

The problems with rights are less obvious to us. There are a couple of problems though. A relatively small one is the superficial flaw noted above in regards to how laws function in the United States. A society based on rights assumes that citizens can be trusted with those rights. Those who trust, risk getting burned. The trusting soul can fall back on rules, but only as deterrence via the threat of retribution, not as direct prevention.

And there is a deeper problem with rights besides, because there is a lazy way of possessing a right. The ideal right-recipient is someone who values the right, and is therefore motivated to understand what the right demands of them, where the right stands in regards to other rights, and what consequences may follow from exercising the right. Being an ideal right holder is a hassle. It’s much easier to stow your rights in your pocket and go do as you like, pulling out the right only when the need arises to ward off relevant trouble.

Certain pathognomonic signs accompany rights laziness. The shiftless typically speak of their rights like an extra appendage. They don’t hold a right; the right is one with their flesh. Following from that characterization, lazy right holders behave as if there is no wrong way to exercise their right.

Driving provides the best example of this mentality. For the lazy, anyone in their way is infringing on their right to drive as they please. The traffic cop is a purveyor of injustice. Judges who restrict drivers licenses are the real criminals, since they violate not just someone’s property, but their very person.

The US, being a rights-based society, has showed those signs of laziness from the very beginning. Its founding documents speak of rights as inalienable, and endowed by the Creator. Eyes and teeth are that kind of thing. Gifts and treasures are not. From the beginning too, Americans have exercised their rights like teeth and eyes, which do not demand accounting, rather than like gifts or treasures, which do.

The archetypical tale of American right-laziness is the tragedy of Kyle Rittenhouse.

By all accounts, he was a 17-year-old boy with very typical issues. He seemed to be searching for an identity along with some validation. He wanted to be a cop or an EMT. In other words, he wanted to do something which came with some power and control as well as the admiration of others. He wanted to do something moral. He had taken a CPR course and put together a jump bag like paramedics carry. Plus, like many if not most 17-year-old boys, he wanted a gun. He probably wanted it for the same reason that many if not most other 17-year-old boys wanted a gun. A gun was a badge of adulthood. It offered instant validation. It compensated for any awkwardness in the bearer. Besides the psychological attractions, it made a lot of noise and smashed stuff.

Unfortunately, he was not old enough to own one himself. Apparently, he prevailed upon an older friend and another adult to purchase and keep the gun for him. The arrangement was against the rules, but might not have been a problem, had the adults not been lazy in the exercise of their right to own a gun. They seem to have treated the gun like it was one of the boys appendages. When he decided to take the weapon with him to try out his identity as an EMT/cop at the site of a real-life conflict, they let him and the rifle go.

When he arrived, he met other people with guns, exercising the right granted them by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. By all accounts, they offered him a task, but no advice, and no further guidance. After a while, he wandered off, looking for someone to help. He soon ran into situations that he could not handle. He lacked the experience. In the end, he shot and killed two people, and permanently maimed a third.

He bore his right like an appendage, but he did not understand the consequences of carrying a gun like he understood the consequences of having an arm or leg. He could not come by an understanding of his right naturally, he had to learn it. But there was no one to teach him. Apparently, the other arms-bearers that he met along the way did not feel like it fell to them to tend to their right as this kid exemplified it.

As a society, we are getting lazier with our rights by the day, and the signs and symptoms show. Nobody knows what to do with their speech. Nobody knows how to meet amicably. Nobody knows how to be armed responsibly. The anxiety that comes with uncertainties is growing, day by day, and each day we become more anxious for rules to dispel the uncertainties.

Authoritarians have begun to pop up in response. They will be happy to provide us with all the rules we want, and then some. They will even sweeten up the rulemaking medicine for us by telling us that they are actually taking rules away, “deregulating” as a means of concentrating power. A set of rules constraining our behaviors (to the advantage of the ruling family) is our fate, unless we stop merely exercising our rights and begin to tend to them.

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Nov 11 2021
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climbing, philosophy, politics, psychology

The Heat of a Separate Logic

Sometimes, I catch my wife watching out of the corner of her eye while I cram my feet into climbing shoes. The process entails a good deal of whining and swearing, which will continue throughout the subsequent training session. She usually keeps quiet about what she sees, but sometimes she can’t help but ask, “What is it that you like so much about climbing?”

I tell her that I like it because it’s war, except that, as opposed to war, if everything goes right, nobody dies. My answer is a bit hyperbolic. For one thing, I have never even been near a war, much less participated in one. What I mean is: the attractive thing about climbing is the same as what those who have fought wars say is the attractive thing about war.

Though it is difficult to put a finger on the source of our attraction, we humans are undoubtedly enamored of war. Our literature enshrines it. It has a permanent place in our culture, in the form of holidays and memorials, but also in practices like the martial arts. The studios can always sell us another war movie.

It isn’t just a fascination born of fear either. We associate warfare with all kinds of positive moral qualities, like courage, loyalty, and determination. Even the Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz, implicated valor as a reason for the individual to become voluntarily involved in warfare. This from the man who said that war has its own grammar, but not its own logic.

Von Clausewitz clarified that position on the nature of war in what is now a famous aphorism: war is politics by other means. Practicalities drive us to war. That can’t be the whole story though. If it were, all armies would be conscripted, and no war would last as long as every war has lasted. We fight well beyond pragmatic exhaustion.

That’s because Von Clausewitz was wrong. War does have its own logic. If we listen to war’s participants, we hear about the struggle to survive their circumstances, and to put an end to the struggle itself by overcoming their opponents. We hear about the moral obligation to protect one’s comrades. The politicians may have pursued their policies into war, but once the war gets going, the fighters fight for other reasons entirely.

If we take logic to mean a description of consistencies between meanings, then we have to conclude that war does have a logic of its own. It is a logic which supersedes all the extrinsic reasons for going to war. Maybe that’s why war persists. Because it is easy to think about getting in to a war on the basis of von Clausewitz’s pragmatism, but once the fight is on, the other logic takes over, and not only gives us a reason to see the war through to some conclusion divorced in principle from political practicalities, but also gives us stories about all those positive moral qualities which the participants find in their quest to come through the catastrophe.

The other logic is always dangling out there. It is the same logic that drives me to climb, and others to fly wing suits, race motorcycles, and ski out of bounds. Any useless activity involving uncertainty and inherent danger will have the same enticing, overpowering consistencies between meanings. There is no practical reason to jump out of a functional airplane. There is no material gain in clawing your way up some obscure cliff face. Even the motorcycle racers and sponsored skiers don’t do it for the pay.

This sort of pursuit challenges us to engage, because once we engage, the other logic, which is the logic of survival, determination, and commitment, takes over and cooks off all the other, weaker, practical logics. For the duration, everything is clearly in its place.

Clarity is not a requirement. In our age, nobody really considers going to war on such a vision quest (we gave that up with the end of dueling). You don’t hear the participants in a battle wax nostalgic about the smell, the cacophony, or the sight of dismembered bodies. At best, the practical details of war just serve as props for the exhibition of the other logic. So often the story goes: I didn’t want to be in a war, but since I was, I tried to take something good away from it, and this is what it was – loyalty, determination, commitment.

Those stories are good ones, maybe even necessary ones. Still, they are an attractive nuisance. They don’t get us into war, but they contribute to a kind of permissive state in our collective psyche. Political practicalities appear more convincing. Our own participation in conflict feels easier to justify, sometimes to such a degree that those who should know better (historian Stephen Ambrose) express regret for never having their courage tested in combat.

That’s what it is about climbing. It’s a way in to the crystal sphere of the other logic. It’s also an admission that I want to live as much as possible in the sphere, though it is impractical. I think that that admission is key. It is the bit of insight which separates an attraction to useless, uncertain and inherently dangerous sports from an attraction to war. So maybe there is one generally useful thing to be had from dangerous sports. If we can cultivate in the larger society, an insight into our own motives for pursuing impractical, uncertain and difficult peril, we might be less susceptible to war’s appeal.

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Sep 10 2021
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biology, Covid-19, medical ethics, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology

The myth of the free range human

… Is a myth that I, as much as anyone, wish were true. My dream is to have a little place in the middle of nowhere, off the grid, with a couple of greenhouses, a composting toilet, a 12gauge loaded with rifled slugs, and a pair of vicious dogs. The truth is though, the only way to realize my dream involves relying on things made on the grid. Even after I am established, I’m going to need things from town – in other words, from other people – to maintain my little homestead.

One might argue that my situation is artificially contrived. Nobody asked me to begin in the middle of a civilization, I was just born here. I had no part in constructing it, and I am quite justified in feeling that the whole thing could’ve turned out a lot better than it did. But that would be wrong too. We are all stuck with something like what we’ve got. It’s inscribed in our genome. When my children were born, I did not have to give them any special instruction in speech and language. I simply talked to them, and soon enough, they began to speak. That’s because they have special structures in their brains which are receptive to language learning. We are social animals, and there’s no getting around that.

We are stuck with a duality. We are fully individual, but we can only realize our individuality by way of our social nature. There are no arts, sports, or academics without other people. And as social creatures, we direct our communal effort towards the full expression of individuality. From the isolated point of view of the collective, arts, sports, and academics are a waste of resources, yet we pursue such things as a group because of their benefits to the individual participants.

The dialectic of the social individual permeates all of our institutions, even medicine. Medical professionals treat patients one by one, but on the basis of the statistical effectiveness of each treatment. In fact, our most effective treatments – interventions involving nutrition, sanitation, and immunization – purely play collective odds to benefit an individual patient’s health.

By the same token, our best treatments are not things done to the patient by the physician. Our best interventions require the participation of the individual, and the exercise of individual virtues like patience, generosity, and courage. The current pandemic is a perfect example. Public health institutions aim to immunize the population, in the hopes of preventing individual tragedies.

Libertarians object to such collective efforts, in defense of individual integrity. But this is where the dialectic flips. To exercise individual virtues, and so maintain individual integrity, each person should participate in the treatment. The failure to do so does not demonstrate rugged individualism, but mean spirited cowardice.

In defense of individual integrity, our society allows meanness and cowardice. Nobody is going to hold someone else down and give them a shot. But neither is anyone obliged to give credence to all the excuses and objections expressed when measures are taken to mitigate the collective effect of failed individual character.

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Feb 02 2021
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climbing, Covid-19, philosophy, politics, psychology, racism, Trump

Realism in the Time of Covid

I walked down the broad, sandy track, distracted. The path was built for motorized traffic, so it required no attention to route finding, and my mind could wander elsewhere, in places far from plagues and Gumby revolutions. But I did not stray for long. Behind me, I heard barking. The noise was the sort of high-pitched yap which a dog makes when something frightening, yet fun, is in progress.

I had assumed that a dog made the sound, but I began to doubt as the yammering grew closer at an unnatural rate and became accompanied by a growl that fluctuated in uneven gasps. I stepped off the track, waiting nervously. But of course, no extraordinary monster appeared around the last bend. What did roll into sight was a standard, biomechanical amalgamation. The dog, a German Shepherd mongrel, sat lashed to the vehicle frame up front, shaking and yelping. Behind the mutt, a lumpy man in a down coat steered the buggy from the comfort of its silver roll cage. He gunned the engine over little rises, and coasted around the curves. He gave a little smile and a wave as he passed me. A small American flag fluttered from the apex of his sun-shade.
The commotion rapidly faded, and I turned my attention back to the walk, and the granite towers at the walk’s end. I could see the formations now. Poking up from the slopes of the Little Valley, they were squat spires, the color of the sand beneath my feet. Most were not monoliths, but stacks of huge blocks, each brick 40 feet or more on a side.
At the apex of a small rise in the trail, a single, rhomboidal flagstone, and a small prickly pear with three leaves marked the turnoff to my objective. They looked as if they had been placed there, but they were no more intended for my purpose than the track of hoof prints which led away from the landmark towards the climb. A dotted line, stamped in the sand by deer and elk, and punctuated with mounds of pellets along the way, wove through the Manzanita until it intersected with a line of Cairns leading to a gigantic stack of boulders.
I dropped my pack at the base. I could not tell if the staging area had been manufactured or not, but it was a perfect little patch of dirt, sheltered by cypress and laurel. I fished the rope out from the bottom of the pack and donned harness and helmet. I carried no more gear, because my goal for the day was not to climb the 4 inch wide crack above me from the bottom up. My goal was to find out if I was still a climber, and if so, to begin to claw my way back to a respectable condition. To those ends, I would crawl through gaps between the blocks above, anchor the rope to a pair of unseen bolts, descend the rope, and climb back up to the bolts as many times as I could.
With the rope tied to my back, I made my way around the side of the formation until I could tunnel through the cracks. The way led down and across to a small alcove. A scraggly alder tree grew there, apparently supported by a very shallow bowl of sand alone. In retrospect, it had made a mistake. Though the spot was secure, the soil was too shallow, and the tree’s highest leaves could only catch sunlight for a couple of hours every day. It could never thrive, but it was a pleasant decoration for the time being. From the alcove, a short, awkward squeeze led to a hidden ledge, and the anchor. I secured my rope to the two bolts.

After descending back to the base, I loaded my self-belay device and began to climb. I moved methodically, not at all like I would climb with a partner belaying from the base. I used a single device for fall protection. This was on purpose. The set up relied on hands and feet as my first line of protection, with the rope and device as backup only. Having a second chance put an edge on the whole project which was lacking in the case of third chances and single chances alone. With a third chance in play, the focus shifted to the equipment and allowed for some slop in the climbing. Committing to one chance only demanded fatalism, and fatalism shifted the focus to the mental equipment needed to accept one’s fate, at the expense of free movement.
I climbed through the route, slowly convincing myself that I could still move smoothly. The effort meant ignoring the grind my left shoulder when I loaded it in extension, and the stiffness in my leg on the right when I tried to step high.
I made it through an acceptable number of laps and pulled the rope. The sun was now as high as it would get in midwinter, and it illuminated a small tuft of leaves poking from the alcove between the boulders above.
I turned my back on the formation and wandered down past the Cairns, the elk pellets, the rhomboidal rock, and the three-leaf pear. With the full warmth of the sun on the Little Valley, the trail was now bustling. A grade school child teetered over a bump on his motorbike. A parent followed, riding a matching cycle nearly on the kid’s back tire. Groups of people, some wearing facemasks, some not, nodded to me politely as I stepped off the trail to let them by.
As usual, I could gauge my distance from the trailhead by the age and attire of passing hikers. I first passed those kitted out with boots and daypacks, then the sneakers lot with their coats tied around their hips, then the shorts and flip-flops crowd. By the time that the expensive homes which flanked the start of the trail were visible, the vast majority of passing travelers wore boat shoes and elastic waistbands and would plainly go only a few more steps beyond the gate. What they sought by this activity, I could not imagine.

The parking area had filled up since my departure, and in the usual fashion. When I had arrived in the morning cold, the only other cars parked in the lot were a dated Subaru and a Toyota truck. The Subaru had a Sierra Club sticker on the back window. The truck was covered in dust. Between morning and afternoon, cleaner vehicles had filled in the rest of the parking spaces. A few of these had American flag decals, and one of the flags was blue with a prominent blue line through the middle of the stripes. One rear window bore a red white and blue “Q”.
I wondered who belonged to those stickers. Nobody on the trail looked crazy. Certainly, nobody looked like a revolutionary, and if my fellow travelers that day really were the sons and daughters of the Revolution, then the revolution would be over as soon as the propane and Slim Jim’s ran out.
I had them entirely wrong, though. What a person trusts depends on what a person wants. What a person wants depends on the depth and breadth of their perception. The revolution was against the untrustable unseen. They revolted against rumors of an invisible pathogen. They revolted against the idea of murky social, political, and personal depths. Most of all, they revolted against a start in the cold and dark which they had somehow been convinced that they were entitled to avoid.

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Nov 07 2020
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climbing, consciousness, philosophy, politics, psychology

Welcome to the Aftermath

“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

  Vince Lombardi

“There only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games

Ernest Hemingway

“The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.”

 Voltaire

The difference between Hemingway’s sports and games is, of course, a matter of winning. In games, winning really is the only thing. In those other endeavors, winning is nothing.
Simply engaging in sport yields the maximum voluntary experience. Engagement delivers everything on the spot, whether or not the participant comes out on the other side, and certainly regardless of winning and losing.
Trophies, money and ribbons only serve to dress sports up by equating them with games. The civilization must thereby disparage sporting ends, since it strives constantly to the opposite goal.
The civilization turns out to be really good at window dressing though. Its props and costumes create a realistic illusion in which games are wholesome and sports are pathologic. Maybe that is why we now live in an age of games and gamesmanship. Our culture has created a situation where Lombardi is right.
Excessive trappings have made sports and sportsmanship not only unrecognizable, but incomprehensible.
Subsequently we have the rise of the consummate gamesman: Trump. To him, there are only winners and losers. Failure to engage and success in shifting the cost define the gamesman’s method.
Allowing him to operate so at the controls of our society has given the whole thing a gamy taint.
To clean it up, we need to make things a little more sporty, though we might not need to make politics quite as sporty as Voltaire suggests.
Perhaps it would be enough to replace the inauguration ceremony with a bullfight.

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Aug 25 2020
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biology, Covid-19, medicine, politics, Trump

For Anyone

…who believes that, “we have more cases because we have more testing”.

Testing for an infectious disease is like counting the number of balloons in a dark room by tossing darts through the doorway. Say you throw 10 darts in the room and hear two pops. There is still a good chance that a number of balloons remain uncounted. But if you throw 40 darts in the room and hear two pops, the likelihood of a two-balloon scenario soars. When the rate of pops drops below a certain proportion, you can be sure that you have counted most of the balloons in the room. A low percentage of positive tests is what you’re after.
Once you have established the adequacy of your testing, you can sort out what the results reveal about containment. The raw numbers don’t tell you that much. In the case of national case counts, it is reasonable to expect a country with a large population to experience higher numbers than a country with a small population given similar degrees of disease containment. A true measure of containment is cases per population, or in our analogy, how crowded the room is with balloons.
So when a pinhead like Trump says that we have more cases because we have more testing, that standalone statement is pure bull shit. What’s worse, it’s a distraction from what really indicates the adequacy of our understanding of the outbreak’s extent and the effectiveness of our efforts to contain it: percent positive tests and infections per population.

How is the US doing?

Top of the heap with >15,000 cases/1 million persons (European Centers for Disease Control)

Percent positive tests: 7.9 (an adequate percentage is less than 5%)

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Apr 06 2020
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biology, Covid-19, medical ethics, medicine, politics, psychology, Trump

H plus or minus the A

Wee Donnie loves his Plaquenil. He says that hydroxychloroquine may be a game changer. He is not a doctor, and he is certainly not an academic, but he says that he has common sense to guide him. His common sense tells him that the drug might have some beneficial effect in Covid-19 infections, times are desperate, and so why not give it a go – what do you have to lose?

Of course, common sense is what tells us that the earth is flat and the sun goes around it. Shockingly, common sense is just as dependable when it comes to bio-statistics. Trump has no idea what he is talkiing about (as usual). Let me heap a fair helping of scorn on his contentions. To do that, Donnie’s argument has to be split into its two components; otherwise, the load would collapse the full-length argument before even a third of the deserved disparagement were dispensed.

Part one concerns the effectiveness of hydroxychlororquine for corona virus. There are a couple of observational studies from China suggesting that moderately ill people given the drug may have been less likely to progress to severe illness. There are also in vitro studies of viral replication which show hydroxychloroquine to be inhibitory. Finally, there is a study examining viral shedding in patients given the drug versus patients not given the drug. This last study is open label, not randomized, and examines a surrogate endpoint – what we want to know is whether the medicine makes people get better, not whether it makes their nasal swab get better.

All of this evidence generates a hypothesis (that hydroxychloroquine may improve clinical outcomes in coronavirus infection) but doesn’t yield any conclusions at all.  To illustrate how this can be so, witness research on the use of this very same drug for influenza treatment. Because, hydroxychloroquine inhibits replication of the influenza virus as well, in vitro. When given to patients in a randomized, controlled trial however, it didn’t make anybody any better, any faster.

But why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? We can go on hope and the possibilities implicit in the observational studies. The med is safe, right? Just give it. To clarify the consequences of such proposals, lets say that the putative cure for Covid-19 is not a Q/T – prolonging antimalarial. Let’s say, it’s a chocolate brownie. The instructions are: chocolate brownies cure corona. That’s it; that’s all we know.

Now, some people are going to take a tiny pinch of brownie, and secure in its protection, head off to the church picnic. They will get the virus and wind up in the ICU.

Other people will eat 5 brownies per day, sending their triglyceride levels through the roof. Those in this group who are also taking certain medications, will develop pancreatitis and wind up in the ICU (drug-drug interaction).

Some will go beyond the 5 brownie dose, to 7 per day. Among this lot are bound to be some latent diabetics who will subsequently land in the unit with hyperglycemic hyperosmolar non-ketotic coma (drug -disease interaction).

Finally, a few true believers will bump the dose to 10 brownies daily. They will experience nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea with subsequent dehydration and acute kidney injury, buying them an ICU bed right beside the Covid patients (adverse drug effect).

The point is: common sense sees no farther than its own nose and is blind to all these eventualities. Scientific method is not, largely because it admits that we can’t know all the eventualities. That’s why good clinical trials measure hard endpoints, like death or time to hospital discharge, and not surrogate markers, like the presence of virus on nasal swabs.

Don’t rely on that nitwit shyster Trump, his toadies, and their common sense. Rely on scientific method instead.

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