A clash of iron; a season of irony

Sep14 by Marc Grober

This is the season for vengeance, sayeth the “patriots”. Over and over again Americans are assault with some form of prescription intended to stir our military loins in recollection of a the destruction of the Trade Towers. Most recently, I saw a primary school teacher accoutred in hand printed US Flag Tees with her students. I have been thinking about that photo for almost a week now and am still not sure what the lesson was, nor am I sure that I want to know. Perhaps, in all the confusion, I am sure about one thing, that dressing kids up to wave the flag in this season is one of the most ironic images that I think I will ever live to see. How can one look at that image and not call to mind the images of children, murdered under the same flag.

Look on those kids (even the one picking his nose.) Not one of those cute children understand what took place on 9/11/73. Not one sees the stark irony in howling about the injustice of one 9/11 while ignoring the other. Of my favorite authors, perhaps Vonnegut captures the irony of this season best. Like Vonnegut we seem to be masters of temporal distortion and disorientation, accomplished at auto-hypnosis and selective amnesia. As I sneak a peak in to the future, this is what I see for future Septembers, “9/11” grief celebrations that extol military virtue not unlike Russian Mayday celebrations.

This year, the 40th anniversary of the American sponsored pusch that deposed the democratically elected President of Chile and ended with the installation of August Pinochet, takes place during ‘aseret yumei tschuvah”, the Jewish ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) with Yom Kippur taking place on shabbat. Amazingly enough, while the local School district still won’t allow activities on Sunday, it made a special arrangement to move high school football games to Thursday and Friday this week, indocating that it was hopeful that the Friday night game would be over by 8:00 pm (when Shabbat and Yom Kippur start.)

The timing of the holidays this year poses much the same questions as the Holocaust did for our grandparents. Are there any innocents, and can you forgive without being forgiving; can you expect atonement from others without owning your own misconduct? What responsibility, if any, does the victim have in his own demise? In a perfect world perhaps the taunt, “You asked for it,” would lose all meaning, but in the world in which I live, a world peopled by those with long memories, simmering resentment and deep anger, owning up to one’s responsibility seems unappetizing to people who wear the red, white and blue.

There are, I suppose, quite a few ways to look at “atonement’, but I tend to see it as requiring a willingness to forgive, as well as a effort seeking forgiveness. It is a process of reconciliation that is not addressed by mailing greeting cards.

While Americans cry that they will never forget the trespasses of others, they might try remembering their own trespasses.

A Peri-Patrick Pelagianation

Mar17 by Marc Grober

As I sit in the evening sun this bright St. Patrick’s day, I think it most fitting to give some thought to Pelagius, who was after all the target of Patrick’s assault on Ireland (no, it certainly was not the snakes, unless, as one might consider Patrick thought, Pelagius was the snakes.)

There is a dispute as to whether Patrick’s mission involved pushing Church orthodoxy (some arguing that Palladius, first Bishop of Ireland, was sent “ad Scotus” for that purpose, and not Patrick, the latter little more than a devout simpleton sent to Erin to bring the Celtic pagans to Christianity), as orthodoxy was a critical concern of Constantine’s Church, and the proclivity to identify heresies where ever it looked continued to be a hallmark of the Church in the 5th century. What could Pelagius have written that would have the Church so wound up? If we turn to the Catholic Encyclopedia we find that Pelagius and his noble buddy lawyer, Caelestius, had the effrontery to suggest that:

Even if Adam had not sinned, he would have died.
Adam’s sin harmed only himself, not the human race.
Children just born are in the same state as Adam before his fall.
The whole human race neither dies through Adam’s sin or death, nor rises again through the resurrection of Christ.
The (Mosaic Law) is as good a guide to heaven as the Gospel.
Even before the advent of Christ there were men who were without sin.

And what, you might ask, does that mean? Well, it means that Pelagius rejected a good deal of the nonsense that Augustine, and Paul before him, invented. Original sin (the bit that suggests that we are all tainted with Adam’s sin, even new born babes)? In the trash. Mosaic Law? More than adequate; NT NOT obligatory. Redemption from sin only through Jesus? Not likely. And the final coup? You didn’t need the Church as a middle man….. OH MY!!!! Pelagius felt that one could find one’s way to heaven without the benefit of clergy. His heresy, in retrospect, is likely closer to the historical Jewish Jesus than much the world has seen since, and Mother Church was hearing none of it.

In Patrick the Church continued to take hard right turns, rejecting the very message that supposedly gave rise to the Church in the first place, but cementing its authority, which arguably was Constantine’s intent, those many decades earlier. For the 21st Century, we find ourselves celebrating Patrick’s feast day while complaining about the lack of social and economic justice, about the crisis of inequality, about rampant capitalism that invariably leads to wage enslavement. Instead, we should all be hoisting a pint to dear old Pelagius,

Sláinte

In addition to the Catholic Encyclopedia you might find the following interesting on whether Pelagius was, well, right:

http://www.sullivan-county.com/id2/pelagius_brit.htm

http://cdn.ktd.me/110/user/3230/Web%2520Images/Worship/Sermons/2005/PelagiusWasRight.pdf

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/episcopalians-maybe-pelagius-was-right/ and the results of the vote: https://www.episcopalatlanta.org/News/newsView.asp?NewsId=409681234

Not Agreeing About Much of Anything

Mar17 by Marc Grober

The title is taken from a theorem that references Aumann’s ¹ 1976 paper demonstrating the logical impossibility of agreeing to disagree, which is referenced by Eli Dourado in his piece in Ümlaut ² suggesting a theory of meta-rationality and arguing that Internet Austrians and Paul Krugman are not meta-rational. Dourado explains the meta-rational as,

honest truth-seekers who choose opinions as if they understand the problem of disagreement and self-deception. According to the theory of disagreement, meta-rational people will not have disagreements among themselves caused by faith in their own superior knowledge or reasoning ability.

relying on a paper by Cowen and Hansen ³ which argues,

honest truth-seeking agents with common priors should not knowingly disagree. Typical disagreement seems explainable by a combination of random belief influences and by priors that tell each person that he reasons better than others. When criticizing others, however, people seem to uphold rationality standards that disapprove of such self-favoring priors. This suggests that typical disagreements are dishonest. Diogenes_looking_for_a_man_-_attributed_to_JHW_Tischbein

It would seem however, that Aumann argues his paper “might be considered evidence against this view, as there are in fact people who respect each other’s opinions and nevertheless disagree heartily about subjective probabilities.” Aumann goes on to state,

It seems to me that the Harsanyi doctrine is implicit in much of this literature; reconciling subjective probabilities makes sense if it is a question of implicitly exchanging information, but not if we are talking about “innate” differences in priors.

Yet Lehrer et al ⁴ note,

Can agents have common knowledge of their beliefs? In a seminal paper Aumann (1976) demonstrates the impossibility of agreeing to disagree: For any posteriors with a common prior, if the agents’ posteriors for an event E are different (= they disagree), then the agents cannot have common knowledge (= agreeing) of these posteriors. Thus, the short answer to our opening question is that agents cannot have common knowledge of their beliefs when they are different.

What does all this mean for Dourado’s application of Cowen and Hanson’s argument about meta-rationality?

First we must address the underlying matter of whether irrational equates with illogical (and vice versa.) Then we must consider the difference between rhetoric and logic. And lastly we need to consider whether Homo sapiens can have common knowledge. Quite a tall order, when Dourado simply wants to point out that Krugman is not fully addressing counterarguments, but then, might Dourado be meta-irrational?

A discussion of whether rational equates with logical, reason with logic, might well start with Max Weber, if for no other reason than Weber described no less than four types of rationality, none of which were mathematically (i.e. logically) defined. Kant argued for two types of rationality (theoretical and practical.) Certainly Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach suggests rather eloquently that logic and reason may easily be contrarian. In other words, Hofstadter suggests that logic is not necessarily meta-rational. Strike one.

The trivium was the introductory medieval course of university study, comprising logic, rhetoric and grammar. Sister Miriam Joseph ⁵ is instructive:

Grammar is concerned with the thing as-it-is-symbolized,
Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known, and
Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as-it-is-communicated.

Need we look further to acknowledge that rhetoric and logic are not congruent, must as logic and reason are no congruent? The point to be taken here is, as Miriam puts it, “Grammar is the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; logic is the art of thinking; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.” Strike two!

And now we must return to Aumann et al., and it would seem that logic tells us that Dourado struck out, as it is unlikely, if not impossible, that Homo sapiens, engaged in argument, can have common knowledge. It would seem that the basis for Dourado’s argument is illogical, but is there rhyme to his reason, rhythm in his rhetoric? Perhaps the reason that we see the concept of meta-rationality promoted are the problems of self-reference and uncommon priors.

“Internet Austrians”, besides assuming that Homo sapiens acts rationally for rational purposes. assume that there can be a state of perfect knowledge and that this state can be obtained naturally by virtue of the population acting rationally for rational purposes, which it is assumed, what the population in fact does. The basis of Austrian thought then is tautological in the sense that according to that School, there being no way to empirically test the assumptions made, the arguments must be a matter of faith.

Of course, the fact that this state has never been observed is attributed to “the venality of Man’s desire to defeat the free market for their own advantage.” ⁶ In other words, the alleged beauty of the wholly free market, the mechanism by which perfect knowledge would be obtained, will ever be defeated by the natural proclivities of Man. Ouroborous; need one say more?

Now we come to the question of uncommon priors which brings us full circle to the question of logic vs rhetoric. While Cowen and Hansen promote theory of logic, as we have noted, logic need not be rational, and it may not be the tool of choice depending on the purpose., as rhetoric is arguably more appropriate to persuasion than logic.

Krugman opens himself to Dourado’s analysis because Krugman, unlike Austrians, argues for external and testable priors, but as Dourado argues (as well as Syll ⁷ and Keen ⁸ , the noted instances just examples of criticism), Krugman does seem to engage in the practices to which Dourado objects. No, Krugman does not do it all the time, but he has been criticized in this vein by other than a young PhD student (who doesn’t, in his piece, connect all the dots to actually demonstrate the “truth” of the criticism he makes.) So, from a gross perspective, Dourado is correct, in that, whether or not he proffers adequate evidence of his points, Krugman’s own peers (and Krugman himself, as we see in his criticism of Stiglitz earlier this year, touted here by David Henderson) engage in such criticism, arguing that various perspectives are or are not accurate, and the basis (or lack thereof) for the criticism.

We have to inquire, though, whether what we are witnessing is a logical academic effort, or a rhetorical policy directed effort, and it would appear that on the face of it, we must agree to agree that the arena Dourado is examining is one of public opinion, where rhetoric holds sway. Does rhetoric render a speaker dishonest? This is where the “theory” becomes unusable in that the theory would require agreement on “facts” and process, and as we have seen, “fact” is illusory and there is no agreement on rhetorical process.

And here is the cross that social science must bear; the elite must, in Cowen & Hansen’s terms, clear a meta-rational space for the discipline, free of the static of “ceteris parabus” and other nonsense. But the academic space is a separate domain from the forum of public opinion, whether that is problematic or not. In the forum of public opinion, Dourado’s criticism may be well placed, but with respect to academics, he has made no case. The rhetorical effort to promote rational policy based on an argument of economic analysis in the public square is a far cry from the court of academe, and in this situation, as in so many others today, we seem to be losing those distinctions; we are in a 21st Century Reformation where any internet blogger presumes himself to have an opinion as valuable as any Nobel Laureate professor.

And this all begs the question presented by Luther some 600 years ago (and in a larger sense presented by Rushdie and Kazantzakis), how does one decide? Dourado promotes Luther’s argument and that having been disastrous once before, I see no reason it wouldn’t be disastrous again, but more on that in the next post…..

Aumann, Robert J. “Agreeing to Disagree.” The Annals of Statistics 4.6 (1976): 1236–1239. JSTOR. Web http://www.jstor.org/stable/2958591 . 17 Mar. 2013. Citing, Harsanyi, J. (1967-1968). Games of incomplete information played by Bayesian players, Parts I-III. Management Sci. 14 159-182, 320-334, 486-502.
“Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?” The Ümlaut. Web http://theumlaut.com/2013/03/13/paul-krugman-is-brilliant-but-is-he-meta-rational/ . 17 Mar. 2013.
Cowen, Tyler, and Robin Hanson. “Are disagreements honest.” Journal of Economic Methodology (2002). Web http://www.mercatus.org/uploadedFiles/Mercatus/Publications/Are%20Disagreements%20Honest%20-%20WP.pdf 17 March 2013.
Lehrer, Ehud, and Dov Samet. “Agreeing to Agree.” Theoretical Economics 6.2 (2011): 269–287. Wiley Online Library. Web http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3982/TE578/abstract . 17 Mar. 2013.
Joseph, Sister Miriam. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric : Understanding the Nature and Function of Language. Paul Dry Books, 2002. Print.
Wingo, Gregory Allen Facebook rant. One might inquire whether it’s more accurate to say “the venality of Man in promoting the free market”…..
“Krugman’s Vindication of Neoclassical Macroeconomics – Brilliantly Silly.” LARS P SYLL. Web http://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/krugmans-vindication-of-neoclassical-macroeconomics-brilliantly-silly/. 17 Mar. 2013.
“Steve Keen: How Krugman Lost Equilibrium (Part 2) « Naked Capitalism.” Web http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/steve-keen-how-krugman-lost-equilibrium-part-2.html . 17 Mar. 2013.

Other references:
Hofstadter, D.R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1999. Art of Mentoring Series.

“You’re not the boss of me!”

Mar9 by Marc Grober

It occurred to me, on the occasion of re-reading, of all things, one of The Economist’s blogs on President Obama’s State of the Union Message (and the blog is well worth reading) that Rawls is an unknown quantity to most Americans. This is not unexpected as so many in the US are under the spell of the credible, but inconsistent (blame Bertand Russell for that) John Locke. Many, if not most, in the US are repelled by the name Machiavelli, but hold as the source of their highest moral authority the concept that they own themselves. Me. Me, of course, leads to Mine. And as the high priest of acquisition, Locke insists that More is a moral imperative.

A major focus of the campaigns against Obama was based on a deliberate effort to misconstrue and misrepresent the President’s speech in which he pointed out that what private business does is based on public infrastructure. The result was the “we built that” flag waving and the accompanying entrepreneurial chest beating that the country endured. What appeared to most Americans as either shallow campaign drivel or at most a principled disagreement on the nature of the welfare state vs personal liberty (though few of those engaging in such discussion really understood those concepts), also offered a third level.

Rawls argues for a collective ownership. You may own property, but your ownership of that property is not absolute in that you could not have obtained it without the assistance of the collective, assistance that from the perspective of the Lockean is at best a beneficial externality if considered at all. Hence, in claiming that “I built that” the Lockean’s unstated claim that he built that on his own, the American entrepreneur is engaging in a deception that Rawls would lay bare.

In suggesting a “just” society, Rawls is doing in a broader sense what we have legislated in the narrower sense with regard to the numbers racket. And as the anarcho-capitalism of the Mafia is arguably the love-child of Austrian economics, Rawls just state offers equality, a value that Locke would have us waive.

So how would that sit with those worshiping at Locke’s altar of Dominionism? They are of course outraged that their authority is not absolute, and just as you would expect from any child confronted with some limitation as to their behavior, they stomp their feet and issue juvenile challenge we all know so well…….

The Horse Behind the Cart

Feb26 by Marc Grober

Some weeks ago, Kathleen McCoy spent not a few column inches of the local rag in her puff piece lauding UAA’s Terry Kelly, “Ethicist handles heavy issues with a light touch.” Unfortunately, one can only conclude that this is further evidence that UAA is not a real educational destination.

UAA’s Terry Kelly must be more a stand-up comic than an ethicist. According to McCoy, he argued, in the most bizarre example of political correctness to date, that if you act in such a way as to make some one else be suspicious of you, you have acted unethically. Yes, you heard me. By way of example, Kelly offered a homily where a husband and wife pledge to be sexually faithful, and then hubbie goes off to spend Friday nights reading at the whorehouse. Kelly claimed that hubbie is acting unethically because his pathetically insecure wife is banging her head against a wall. Really?

Kelly then went on to confuse matters with a retelling of the Clinton/Lewinsky gaffe, misrepresenting the facts and of course drawing the wrong conclusion. He finally tackled his real target (after an unfortunate attempt to hijack the theory of cognitive dissonance), which appeared to be the impact of government officials receiving gifts. He apparently closed with something along the lines of “trustworthy behavior is persuasive behavior, and untrustworthy behavior is unethical.”

Yes. Instead of arguing that trust is based on ethical behavior, he argues that ethical behavior is based on trust. Very inventive. Or delusional. The word trust comes from the Norse “traust” and is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “to have belief or confidence in the honesty, goodness, skill or safety of a person, organization or thing.” Trustworthy of course is to be worthy of trust. Ethics, per the Oxford Dictionary, are, “moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity”, and the entry goes on to explain:

Schools of ethics in Western philosophy can be divided, very roughly, into three sorts. The first, drawing on the work of Aristotle, holds that the virtues (such as justice, charity, and generosity) are dispositions to act in ways that benefit both the person possessing them and that person’s society. The second, defended particularly by Kant, makes the concept of duty central to morality: humans are bound, from a knowledge of their duty as rational beings, to obey the categorical imperative to respect other rational beings. Thirdly, utilitarianism asserts that the guiding principle of conduct should be the greatest happiness or benefit of the greatest number

So we can take ethical to mean, depending on the system to which you subscribe, compliance with some code of conduct. In sum, we may have confidence that others may conduct themselves ethically, but if we lack confidence how can that possibly change whether the erstwhile target of out attentions is ethical or not?

What Terry Kelly has proposed is nothing less than a feedback loop, a neurotic echo chamber where what is real is not what you do, but what someone perceives you to do. While in a very primitive form this may hearken back to the social psychology of the ’70s and the concept of the social construction of reality, it beggars the concept of ethics, for it renders ethics dependent on the feedback loop and enables insecurity. You can only be as ethical as you convince your observer you are. He has turned philosophy into advertising, for under his rules, one becomes ethical not by adhering to a code, but by convincing others that one does, and after all, that is what our politicians try to do today, and is exactly opposite of the point we think Kelly was trying to argue. Kelly has shifted the subjective lens, and lost sight of the situation entirely.

Only His Hairdresser Knows for Sure…..

Feb24 by Marc Grober

A year or so ago UAA Nursing Students decided to put the question of whether the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of Vitamin D would produce adequate blood levels to the test and found that the RDA came nowhere close to ensuring adequate Vitamin D. Alaskan doctors are now suggesting 4000 IU daily (combined with Magnesium and Calcium) while many foolish Alaskans complain or suffer from the conditions listed below and do nothing about it.

Now a Republican Alaska State Senator has announced he is interested in doing something about this. Senator Seaton wants to test newborns for Vitamin D, while the Republican Administration dismisses concerns over the impact of inadequate Vitamin D. HB90 would create a “temporary” program for testing newborns at delivery. The text of the Bill and the Sponsor statement (available here) is well worth the read.

A big problem, however, is that Alaska hospitals have made a habit out of turning parents of newborns into criminals as they surreptitiously turn maternal blood test results over to OCS and State police over even the legal presence of anything “suspicious” in the blood, and let’s face it, Seaton’s colleagues seem much more interested in regulating wombs and criminalizing female behavior than in addressing any health care issue. Moreover, it would clearly be more important from all perspectives to have pre-natal data from pregnant mothers than on new born children, but Alaska is certainly not interested in ensuring that all women have adequate prenatal care.

The wing nut right fail to see this as one might argue the GOP caucus does (as a way to seize further control of women) and look at it instead through delusional Lockean glasses, arguing that Seaton is intruding into the individual’s privacy and that the legislature has no business addressing public health issues (except when it is someone else.) Of course, this is in no small part because though they scream and yell that we should be complying with the Constitution, they have never read that document (save perhaps to support amending same to fund religious schools.) The Constitution mandates ¹ that the Legislature must address the general health and welfare, which is clearly challenged by the gross inadequacy of Vitamin D.

What a mess! We seem to have an unholy alliance of liberals and conservatives to wrest control of pre and post natal care from parents while failing to really acknowledge the underlying health issues facing Alaskans and the need to boldly address same (Governor Sean Parnell, is even an embarrassment to Governor Brewer, who finally admitted that her state needs to get onboard with the ACA.) The GOP legislative caucuses are VERY busy rushing ALEC based repressive legislation in to law, and really can’t be bother with health policy.

So we all have a dilemma, here in the far north. Is Senator Seaton et al really concerned about the health of Alaskans, or are they merely looking for a way to ensure that all mothers get drug tested? The shortsighted nature of the policy and the questionable ethics of the caucus suggests that one look beyond the purported purpose of the Bill, but is Seaton really that much of a prat? Well…….

Impacts of a Vitamin D deficiency ²
1.) The flu – In a study published in the Cambridge Journals, it was discovered that vitamin D deficiency predisposes children to respiratory diseases. An intervention study conducted showed that vitamin D reduces the incidence of respiratory infections in children.

2.) Muscle weakness – According to Michael F. Holick, a leading vitamin D expert, muscle weakness is usually caused by vitamin D deficiency because for skeletal muscles to function properly, their vitamin D receptors must be sustained by vitamin D.

3.) Psoriasis – In a study published by the UK PubMed central, it was discovered that synthetic vitamin D analogues were found useful in the treatment of psoriasis.

4.) Chronic kidney disease – According to Holick, patients with advanced chronic kidney diseases (especially those requiring dialysis) are unable to make the active form of vitamin D. These individuals need to take 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 or one of its calcemic analogues to support calcium metabolism, decrease the risk of renal bone disease and regulate parathyroid hormone levels.

5.) Diabetes – A study conducted in Finland was featured in Lancet.com in which 10,366 children were given 2000 international units (IU)/day of vitamin D3 per day during their first day of life. The children were monitored for 31 years and in all of them, the risk of type 1 diabetes was reduced by 80 percent.

6.) Asthma – Vitamin D may reduce the severity of asthma attacks. Research conducted in Japan revealed that asthma attacks in school children were significantly lowered in those subjects taking a daily vitamin D supplement of 1200 IU a day.

7.) Periodontal disease – Those suffering from this chronic gum disease that causes swelling and bleeding gums should consider raising their vitamin D levels to produce defensins and cathelicidin, compounds that contain microbial properties and lower the number of bacteria in the mouth.

8.) Cardiovascular disease – Congestive heart failure is associated with vitamin D deficiency. Research conducted at Harvard University among nurses found that women with low vitamin D levels (17 ng/m [42 nmol/L]) had a 67 percent increased risk of developing hypertension.

9.) Schizophrenia and Depression – These disorders have been linked to vitamin D deficiency. In a study, it was discovered that maintaining sufficient vitamin D among pregnant women and during childhood was necessary to satisfy the vitamin D receptor in the brain integral for brain development and mental function maintenance in later life.

10.) Cancer – Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC discovered a connection between high vitamin D intake and reduced risk of breast cancer. These findings, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research, revealed that increased doses of the sunshine vitamin were linked to a 75 percent reduction in overall cancer growth and 50 percent reduction in tumor cases among those already having the disease. Of interest was the capacity of vitamin supplementation to help control the development and growth of breast cancer specially estrogen-sensitive breast cancer.

1 Alaska Constitution Article 7 http://ltgov.alaska.gov/treadwell/services/alaska-constitution/article-viiA096A0health-education-and-welfare.html

2 Geib, Aurora. “The 10 symptoms of vitamin D deficiency you need to recognize” Natural News, 2/10/2012 Web http://www.naturalnews.com/035089_vitamin_D_deficiency_signs_symptoms.html

Mediating Self Medication

Feb20 by Marc Grober

Dr. Gabor Maté argued to Alaska that, “The first question in addiction is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And if you understand a human being’s pain, you cannot look at their genes.” You can listen to his presentation at http://www.alaskapublic.org/2013/02/15/addiction-from-heroin-to-workaholism/ . While the proposed historical basis for his arguments are dubious, and the jargon makes one shudder to think of Fritz Perl voodoo and the modern profit center of “mental health”, there is a good deal to be said for a functional approach to addiction, and under the patina of the sloppy academics and loose jargon, that is, after all, what the good doctor is talking about.

Maté, like some medical analog of D’Souza’s “nemesis”, argues that western imperialism is responsible for “addiction”, in that while tribal people may use psychoactive substances, they do so reverently and with cultural approval, and therefore not addictively. Apparently the pervasive and ubiquitous use of betel nut, coca leaf and other similar substances (Sullivan and Hagen), are overlooked by Maté. Maté only has eyes for noble savages, while Anthropology retired that trope years ago (Ellingson, Grinde et al., Hames.)

But the presentation, ”The Hungry Ghost: A Biospsychosocial Perspective on Addiction, from Heroin to Workaholism” based on the book “In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction“, can be forgiven the blood libel. The important bit is that Maté effectively makes the case that addicts are not necessarily the insane and mentally ill, nor deviant fiends bent on breaking the law; they are as likely to be persons doing their best to essentially self-medicate themselves to states in which they can survive.

And THAT serves as an excellent indictment of both the criminal justice approach to addiction AND the mental health approach to addiction. The former punishes the addict for attempting to comply with other’s rules, and the latter denies the rationality of the user.

I don’t want to sink in to some ridiculous libertarian rant about natural rights; that is not what this is about. What we have done, though, is created a religion in which the MDs are high priests and BigPharma are the keepers of the sacraments. If I can manage what ails me through moderate use of caffeine and marijuana, why should I not be permitted to do so? Is the threat of societal implosion from a 7% solution so extraordinary that we must so vehemently denounce so much of our world?

Perhaps what we need more of are not the empty chairs of Gestalt Therapy (yes, Clint was engaging in classic Gestalt therapy during the GOP convention) nor private prison beds (rendering Puritanism a profit center), but effective mediators. Once upon a time I think we called such people social workers; persons who went out in to the community and assisted others in coping with a society whose demands were in some respect more than one might be able to manage. We don;t need to talk about defective genes; we need to talk about a dysfunctional society, and what we can do to recognize and perhaps moderate the responses of some to that dismal fact of life. No, there are no silver bullets, but having some understanding of the underlying circumstances, and abandoning the Puritan intolerance that drives even those who deny same, will be a start.

Work Cited

Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. University of California Press, 2000. Print.

Grinde, Donald A., Bruce Elliott Johansen, and University of California, Los Angeles American Indian Studies Center. Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. American Indian Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. (http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/EoL/index.html)

Raymond, Hames. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36.1 (2007): 177–190. Web http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123321. 20 Feb. 2013.

M.D, Gabor Mate. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. North Atlantic Books, 2011. Print.

Sullivan, R. J., and E. H. Hagen. “Psychotropic Substance-seeking: Evolutionary Pathology or Adaptation?” Addiction 97.4 (2002): 389–400. Web http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1360-0443.2002.00024.x/full. 20 Feb. 2013.

Martin Luther King and the Roots of Western Narcissism

Jan22 by Marc Grober

While a significant portion of the Unites States electorate, intoxicated with a heady brew of Lockean liberalism, decries “socialism in America”, many have suggested that in the possessive individualism underlying this rhetoric lies the root of our social narcissism and the ultimate failure of our society. MacPherson wrote 40 years ago that,

“…the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory lie deeper than had been thought, that the original seventeenth-century individualism contained the central difficulty, which lay in its possessive quality. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and or the maintenance o an orderly relation of exchange.” C. B. MacPherson. The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press, 1969

MacPherson goes on to note that we seem to obtain no satisfaction from the having, but instead are firmly fixed on the getting. Of course, those that have more find it easy to get more, and that invariably means that those that have less always get less.

Perhaps it was Hobbes who truly wrote Golding’s Lord of the Flies, painting a truly ruthless picture of mankind in his natural state, Ecce Homo! I was taken with the rather human mechanics of the following observation

Subordinate birds have to look for food whenever and wherever they can find it, and carry fat on their bodies to hedge against unpredictable rations. Dominant birds, which can push subordinates off food, can choose when they eat and so lessen their odds of being eaten themselves.

From Convention to Van Buren, Jefferson’s party railed against a Hobbesian solution. Yet under Madison they murdered Federalists in Baltimore, under Jackson they murdered thousands of Indians, and they finally forced this country into its greatest domestic convulsion, resulting in the virtual destruction of the South and the termination of that curious institution upon which their agrarian utopia was based.

Martin Luther King, though he dreamed wondrous dreams, understood perhaps as well as any Nobel Laureate economist (for example, Joseph Stiglitz) that the root of inequality was economic injustice. While King’s Dream continues to challenge and seems resonant with most Americans, there is a dissonance of alarming degree between the Lockean liberalism which is argued to anchor this country, and the socialism which we see in King’s oration. In fact, you may well find that Dr. King has more in common with that “villain”, Niccolo Machiavelli, than with Jefferson’s “Saint”, Sidney Algernon.

Machiavelli has been disparaged for centuries. Frederick the Great wrote,

Machiavel’s The Prince is to ethics what the work of Spinoza is to faith. Spinoza sapped the fundamentals of faith, and drained the spirit of religion; Machiavel corrupted policy, and undertook to destroy the precepts of healthy morals: the errors of the first were only errors of speculation, but those of the other had a practical thrust. The theologians have sounded the alarm bell and battled against Spinoza, refuting his work in form and defending the Divinity against his attack, while Machiavel has only been badgered by moralists. In spite of them, and in spite of its pernicious morals, The Prince is very much on the pulpit of policy, even in our day.

Frederick takes on Machiavelli AND Spinoza (leaving us to wonder why he failed to indict Hobbes) for their attacks on the virtue that he seems to believe leaps, as did Athena, from the godhead. Frederick’s argument is based on the superstition inherent in the supernatural, while his targets labor in what Hobbes called the state of nature, the real world. A place called Wall Street.

Madison’s Constitution is very much of that real world. Machiavelli would be very comfortable with Connelly’s view of Madison and vice versa. In fact Machiavelli argued,

I say therefore that all the (previously) mentioned forms are inferior because of the brevity of the existence of those three that are good, and of the malignity of those three that are bad. So that those who make laws prudently having recognized the defects of each, (and) avoiding every one of these forms by itself alone, they selected one (form) that should partake of all, they judging it to be more firm and stable, because when there is in the same City (government) a Principality, an Aristocracy, and a Popular Government (Democracy), one watches the other.

Machiavelli is no idealistic and impractical Jefferson, howling at the moon while Madison cleans up the mess, and Madison, complaining himself centuries after the publication of The Discourses, writes in Federalist #10,

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.

Neither is Machiavelli some foolish aristocrat like The Mandragola‘s Nicia, ensnared in what detractors might claim is a Ligurio’s web of deceit. The fact of the matter is that Machiavelli’s conceit ends with what might be considered economic justice for all. In a society where this is a scarcity, each (as the Stones, writing in the same year as MacPherson, might put it) might not get what they want, but if they try real hard, will get what they need.

We have been awash in Sidney Algernon’s small “r” republican Saints and their moralizing Reformationist brethren who have bequeathed to us not the generous philosophy of social justice Jefferson ascribed to Jesus to which he claimed to subscribe, but a grasping self-involvement where the three operative words are all too familiar to the parent of any two year old: me, mine, and more.

But Machiavelli sets the same table as Teddy Roosevelt, though The Prince may be seen as a manual for the basest policies and Square Deal the acme of American values. Unlike the Mad Hatter’s table, there are seats for all here and arm in arm with Teddy and Niccolo, we come full circle to King. Yes, Dr. King may have been troubled by much of Marx’s message regarding the ill effects of religion, but in the real world, we see man’s religious institutions arguing economic injustice, while we see Marx arguing that workers should own the means of their production.

As Alice suggested, “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released in 1967, is a graphic reminder of the importance of making room at the table, and that if we purport to make room at the table, then we had best be prepared to welcome and feed all comers.

Pardon me, but….

A serious place for some serious discussion

Author Archives: Marc Grober

A Peri-Patrick Pelagianation

Not Agreeing About Much of Anything

Martin Luther King and the Roots of Western Narcissism