Personally I think pessimism is the only game in town, much more reality-based than any other slant on things. Pessimists are interesting to talk to (if they’ll talk) and easier to have a nuts and bolts discussion with than fuzzy-headed optimists who are so happy they keep changing the subject. Psychiatrists say that many so-called depressed people are actually just much more realistic about life than optimists as it takes a huge jolt of fantasy to keep going day to day in our modern world. But I do get tired of my own pessimism sometimes (believe it or not) and when I need a fix of the happy stuff, I read Ode. This is a magazine started in the Netherlands some years ago and now available in an American English edition. It is full of upbeat articles about where the world is going and how we can all solve the world’s problems with our innate human skills-- stories like that about compassionate capitalism in India (Tata Motors), the transformation of Rwanda due to the overwhelming majority of women left after the genocide, the Niroga Institue which teaches yoga in prisons, nursing homes and hospitals, all written in an upbeat way makes one believe that there is hope and good out there in the world somewhere. Every time I finish an Ode, I feel like cheering. Although I catch myself being grumpy about the new-age capitalism so apparent in the glossy, well-designed ads, I tell myself I would rather have those than the ads for pharma and cars and booze that clog the pages of more “worldly” magazines. True, the whole tone of the mag can seem a little too happy at times, slightly lobotomized in its lack of depth or probing, almost over-medicated on happy (there I go being pessimistic again). But if that is what it takes to save the world, OK, maybe we can afford to evolve in a direction which allows more cooperation, less competition for resources, a happyization that disables our red-in-tooth-and-claw genes and enables us to be satisfied with less, even if it includes less brooding about what we are losing.
Ode Magazine. You can read the digital edition here: http://www.odemagazine.com/.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
The voice of Gomer
Flash! Front page news in the Billings Gazette, this just in—fertilizer prices rising, wheat farmers hard hit! Right underneath was a story about oil prices probably going to rise a whole lot more. Somewhere, maybe not in Billings, I am sure there are more than a few people who see the connection and who saw all this coming a long time ago. Why anybody would think the current system could persist at all is beyond me. While reading these articles all I could hear was the voice of Gomer Pyle in my ears: “ Surprise, surprise, surprise . . .”
Wheat has only been grown in large swathes on the Great Plains since the 1930’s when it became possible because of large plows pulled by gasoline powered tractors. They got a good crop for a few years before the soil wore out and of course the answer thought up, even then by bankers, machinery salesmen, and commodity brokers, not farmers, was to apply increasing levels of chemical fertilizer, buy bigger tractors, and farm larger acreages. Seventy years on, the topsoil is gone, fertilizer has become so vital that the scheme works even if the wheat is grown in sterile sand. (Huge amounts of soil blow away each year on the plains but no one really cares because with chemical fertilizer they think they don’t need the topsoil anymore.) Not only is much of the fertilizer made from petroleum, it takes increasing amounts of diesel to pull the spreaders since more and more must be applied as the soil wears out. What if a typical, hard-headed Montana rancher had been in charge of the whole process back then—he or she would have said, “Nope, won’t work. Can’t get into something like this, costs too much. We’re gonna lose out and then get stuck with a bunch of machinery we can’t pay for.” But there were too many bankers persuading the rancher that he was too timid and no Montanan likes to be called timid, so he bought his first tractor and then it was downhill to the present day. Huge chunks of perfectly good rangeland that raised lots of cattle (and buffalo) in the past are now so exhausted it will take centuries before they can even grow grass. If all fertilizer applications were suddenly stopped tomorrow, most of the Golden Triangle (that’s the wheat bowl area north of the Missouri and east of Great Falls) would, in a very few years, become the Great Northern Desert and tourists would no longer have to trek to the Sahara or the Gobi. When all this shakes out over our lifetimes and those of our children, people may survive on the plains as farmers, but if they do it will probably be with horse drawn plows and small acreages. If there had never been the instantly addicting jolt of petroleum shot into the veins of the world’s economy, there might now be stable systems using large-scale composting and no-till planting that still could feed large numbers of people.
When the politicians and the headline-grabbers and the shouters with their tiny minds and large appetites for power rant about the “energy problem”, the assumption made, and tacitly accepted by their listeners, is that this is a problem that can be solved. They insist that there are alternatives available to us that can allow us to continue living as we have come to enjoy, that it is carved on some stone or God-given tablet that Americans (leading the way,as usual!) and all people (eventually, when they become as enlightened as Americans) are entitled to live leisurely, supermarket-fed lives, working at a nice clean job for a few hours a day, spending their evenings in creative pursuits, maybe taking a pottery class (how creative! how earthy!) or living for a few hours in the virtual lives of TV movie characters. No American dreams that they might have to get dirt under their fingernails in the future or see their children go to bed hungry.
Thirty years ago when I left the academic world for the life of a potter I felt the need, as did many in my generation, to “get back to the land” to do something “real”. I did not see then how many layers would have to be peeled off the onion to really reach the core of “reality”. In the 21st century making pottery in America is a feeble gesture, almost fatuous. Instead of practicing the “real” trade I had sought, or doing something that would in fact bring people closer to the earth, it gobbles up huge energy inputs with inefficient kilns and long hauls for specially prepared clay (not just dug out of the hillside anymore, sorry). The resulting pottery is a curiosity, a bauble for the rich and its “art” if there is any, must cater to the whims of the spoiled and powerful. That’s just my story—many people, if they are totally honest with themselves, will see the contradictions built into their part of the system, will see how overextended and petroleum-addicted it all is. I don’t see that there are drastic things any of us can do about it on an individual level, except perhaps not vote for idiots. Rather than doing feeble little things to get in touch with the Earth, I am pretty sure that soon the Earth is going to get in touch with us in a very forceful way. Hang on. Shake your head and talk like Gomer Pyle, it might make you feel better.
Wheat has only been grown in large swathes on the Great Plains since the 1930’s when it became possible because of large plows pulled by gasoline powered tractors. They got a good crop for a few years before the soil wore out and of course the answer thought up, even then by bankers, machinery salesmen, and commodity brokers, not farmers, was to apply increasing levels of chemical fertilizer, buy bigger tractors, and farm larger acreages. Seventy years on, the topsoil is gone, fertilizer has become so vital that the scheme works even if the wheat is grown in sterile sand. (Huge amounts of soil blow away each year on the plains but no one really cares because with chemical fertilizer they think they don’t need the topsoil anymore.) Not only is much of the fertilizer made from petroleum, it takes increasing amounts of diesel to pull the spreaders since more and more must be applied as the soil wears out. What if a typical, hard-headed Montana rancher had been in charge of the whole process back then—he or she would have said, “Nope, won’t work. Can’t get into something like this, costs too much. We’re gonna lose out and then get stuck with a bunch of machinery we can’t pay for.” But there were too many bankers persuading the rancher that he was too timid and no Montanan likes to be called timid, so he bought his first tractor and then it was downhill to the present day. Huge chunks of perfectly good rangeland that raised lots of cattle (and buffalo) in the past are now so exhausted it will take centuries before they can even grow grass. If all fertilizer applications were suddenly stopped tomorrow, most of the Golden Triangle (that’s the wheat bowl area north of the Missouri and east of Great Falls) would, in a very few years, become the Great Northern Desert and tourists would no longer have to trek to the Sahara or the Gobi. When all this shakes out over our lifetimes and those of our children, people may survive on the plains as farmers, but if they do it will probably be with horse drawn plows and small acreages. If there had never been the instantly addicting jolt of petroleum shot into the veins of the world’s economy, there might now be stable systems using large-scale composting and no-till planting that still could feed large numbers of people.
When the politicians and the headline-grabbers and the shouters with their tiny minds and large appetites for power rant about the “energy problem”, the assumption made, and tacitly accepted by their listeners, is that this is a problem that can be solved. They insist that there are alternatives available to us that can allow us to continue living as we have come to enjoy, that it is carved on some stone or God-given tablet that Americans (leading the way,as usual!) and all people (eventually, when they become as enlightened as Americans) are entitled to live leisurely, supermarket-fed lives, working at a nice clean job for a few hours a day, spending their evenings in creative pursuits, maybe taking a pottery class (how creative! how earthy!) or living for a few hours in the virtual lives of TV movie characters. No American dreams that they might have to get dirt under their fingernails in the future or see their children go to bed hungry.
Thirty years ago when I left the academic world for the life of a potter I felt the need, as did many in my generation, to “get back to the land” to do something “real”. I did not see then how many layers would have to be peeled off the onion to really reach the core of “reality”. In the 21st century making pottery in America is a feeble gesture, almost fatuous. Instead of practicing the “real” trade I had sought, or doing something that would in fact bring people closer to the earth, it gobbles up huge energy inputs with inefficient kilns and long hauls for specially prepared clay (not just dug out of the hillside anymore, sorry). The resulting pottery is a curiosity, a bauble for the rich and its “art” if there is any, must cater to the whims of the spoiled and powerful. That’s just my story—many people, if they are totally honest with themselves, will see the contradictions built into their part of the system, will see how overextended and petroleum-addicted it all is. I don’t see that there are drastic things any of us can do about it on an individual level, except perhaps not vote for idiots. Rather than doing feeble little things to get in touch with the Earth, I am pretty sure that soon the Earth is going to get in touch with us in a very forceful way. Hang on. Shake your head and talk like Gomer Pyle, it might make you feel better.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Gimme that Olde Time Religion . . .
Hoo boy—a discussion of religion. I had better watch out—I have a history of getting my head handed to me when I bring this up.
So it is with strong trepidaceous feelings that I mention that I have just finished another book (one of Peter B.’s picks) called Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer. A very dense but thorough argument for all of our spiritual ideas, notions, feeling, etc. having their origin in brain systems, common to all humans, that evolved to promote social adhesion, cooperation, accurate reading of another human’s emotions, etc. For instance, because we have evolved brain systems to be hypervigilant about possible predators, we are tuned to instantly pay attention to a sudden movement in a tree. Because there is an evolutionary advantage to “overdetection” (false positives carry little cost, false negatives may be fatal) we tend to think such sudden movements are caused by conscious agents rather than the wind. By the time we see that the tree contains no leopard or neighboring tribesman, we have already ascribed an agency to the motion and, if the wind isn’t blowing, will tend to file it under the “supernatural”. Boyer goes on in some detail about gods as predators—they have a lot in common. We tend to be fearful of both and project a complete awareness of our thoughts to both. Then he analyzes more modern organized religions with their priesthoods--systems of spiritual belief when some people in the culture learn to systematize those beliefs and write them down, in the process becoming specialists who then claim that only they can interpret the holy writings. Also his discussion of fundamentalism is right on target: the only way to make sense of the passion and violence that members of fundamentalist religious groups exhibit is to see their behavior as caused by the threat of un-punished defection from the group. Humans evolved needing tightly cohesive group structures and if it is possible to leave the group without paying a heavy price the group cannot exist.
The author is an anthropologist who has worked extensively with African tribes having a system of ancestor worship that believes in dead ancestors and spirits being everywhere, constantly needing propiation, sacrifices, etc. in order to avoid misfortune. He has the patience and the background to delve into the problem of where we get so many “religious” ideas and why all human religions have their basic structure in common. With a deep understanding of this sort of belief system, it is much easier to tackle the problem of where religious thought comes from by looking at the unorganized belief systems humans have evolved than if he started with modern organized literate religions. But he doesn't stop with the simpler beliefs; he thoroughly traces the brain structures and instincts causing religion all the way from primitive tribes to the Vatican.
I find Evolutionary Psychology to be a very pertinent and interesting field that gives us new ways to figure out why we are what we are by looking at where we came from. Whether you are a fervent True Believer who clings to your system and who doesn’t like religion’s trees being shaken or are a scientist who firmly believes the universe to be just a big pachinko machine, this book will make you think about why you believe what you believe --Mr. Scientist’s beliefs can be construed to be just as much a result of evolved “religious” brain structures as Mr. Jihadi's.
On another tangent, while reading this book I couldn’t help reflecting how lucky we are to have Science to offer an alternative explanation, even if we secretly hold some cherished spiritual beliefs close to our heart. Imagine what it would be like to be born into and live with a system of beliefs where every rock, every tree, was a ghost or spirit which might or might not be angry with you at any time. Very stressful. I am not saying there is anything wrong or bad about African animistic ancestor worship, but I guess I really appreciate being in a culture where we have had some exposure to modern scientific interpretations of the world and can therefore at times, if we feel overstressed by too many gods and spirits, retreat a ways into an ivory tower and just be agnostic for a time. I do like the approach of North American native belief systems where everything is a being, alive in some sense, part of the world and therefore to be respected. This way of thinking leads to a respect for Nature and if all Americans felt this way there would be fewer strip mines. But I really take issue with those who reflexively reject anything and everything they can call “science”—in other words any explanation of the universe that conflicts with the beliefs they have inherited. You are sure missing a lot if you insist that all knowledge is contained in your Bible or your Koran. Science really has no judgement to make about your belief systems, go ahead and believe them. But to reject scientific explanations is also to reject a great deal of the wonder in what we are finding this universe to be. Pascal Boyer, in examining systems of our human mind that account for religion in all humans deliberately never asks any “big” questions like “Why” or “How”; his book is not about why we feel something has to account for the Big Bang, but rather about why we feel that the Something has a face like a human and thinks like we do about things like Good and Evil.
No matter what your personal belief system might be, read the book, it will start you thinking.
So it is with strong trepidaceous feelings that I mention that I have just finished another book (one of Peter B.’s picks) called Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer. A very dense but thorough argument for all of our spiritual ideas, notions, feeling, etc. having their origin in brain systems, common to all humans, that evolved to promote social adhesion, cooperation, accurate reading of another human’s emotions, etc. For instance, because we have evolved brain systems to be hypervigilant about possible predators, we are tuned to instantly pay attention to a sudden movement in a tree. Because there is an evolutionary advantage to “overdetection” (false positives carry little cost, false negatives may be fatal) we tend to think such sudden movements are caused by conscious agents rather than the wind. By the time we see that the tree contains no leopard or neighboring tribesman, we have already ascribed an agency to the motion and, if the wind isn’t blowing, will tend to file it under the “supernatural”. Boyer goes on in some detail about gods as predators—they have a lot in common. We tend to be fearful of both and project a complete awareness of our thoughts to both. Then he analyzes more modern organized religions with their priesthoods--systems of spiritual belief when some people in the culture learn to systematize those beliefs and write them down, in the process becoming specialists who then claim that only they can interpret the holy writings. Also his discussion of fundamentalism is right on target: the only way to make sense of the passion and violence that members of fundamentalist religious groups exhibit is to see their behavior as caused by the threat of un-punished defection from the group. Humans evolved needing tightly cohesive group structures and if it is possible to leave the group without paying a heavy price the group cannot exist.
The author is an anthropologist who has worked extensively with African tribes having a system of ancestor worship that believes in dead ancestors and spirits being everywhere, constantly needing propiation, sacrifices, etc. in order to avoid misfortune. He has the patience and the background to delve into the problem of where we get so many “religious” ideas and why all human religions have their basic structure in common. With a deep understanding of this sort of belief system, it is much easier to tackle the problem of where religious thought comes from by looking at the unorganized belief systems humans have evolved than if he started with modern organized literate religions. But he doesn't stop with the simpler beliefs; he thoroughly traces the brain structures and instincts causing religion all the way from primitive tribes to the Vatican.
I find Evolutionary Psychology to be a very pertinent and interesting field that gives us new ways to figure out why we are what we are by looking at where we came from. Whether you are a fervent True Believer who clings to your system and who doesn’t like religion’s trees being shaken or are a scientist who firmly believes the universe to be just a big pachinko machine, this book will make you think about why you believe what you believe --Mr. Scientist’s beliefs can be construed to be just as much a result of evolved “religious” brain structures as Mr. Jihadi's.
On another tangent, while reading this book I couldn’t help reflecting how lucky we are to have Science to offer an alternative explanation, even if we secretly hold some cherished spiritual beliefs close to our heart. Imagine what it would be like to be born into and live with a system of beliefs where every rock, every tree, was a ghost or spirit which might or might not be angry with you at any time. Very stressful. I am not saying there is anything wrong or bad about African animistic ancestor worship, but I guess I really appreciate being in a culture where we have had some exposure to modern scientific interpretations of the world and can therefore at times, if we feel overstressed by too many gods and spirits, retreat a ways into an ivory tower and just be agnostic for a time. I do like the approach of North American native belief systems where everything is a being, alive in some sense, part of the world and therefore to be respected. This way of thinking leads to a respect for Nature and if all Americans felt this way there would be fewer strip mines. But I really take issue with those who reflexively reject anything and everything they can call “science”—in other words any explanation of the universe that conflicts with the beliefs they have inherited. You are sure missing a lot if you insist that all knowledge is contained in your Bible or your Koran. Science really has no judgement to make about your belief systems, go ahead and believe them. But to reject scientific explanations is also to reject a great deal of the wonder in what we are finding this universe to be. Pascal Boyer, in examining systems of our human mind that account for religion in all humans deliberately never asks any “big” questions like “Why” or “How”; his book is not about why we feel something has to account for the Big Bang, but rather about why we feel that the Something has a face like a human and thinks like we do about things like Good and Evil.
No matter what your personal belief system might be, read the book, it will start you thinking.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Limits
An essay by Wendell Barry leads off the May Harpers:
But how many times does all this need to be said? Why do we keep jazzing ourselves up with hubristic desires for unlimited growth? Why do we keep on with our smug American self assurance that we will figure this all out and still be able to water the golf course and drive the BMW? Does anyone remember E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful? That was published 35 years ago; at the time I read it and thought “This is earthshaking! Now things will begin to change!” But if you Google “small is beautiful” today you will get one or two references to the book and a whole lot of other crap, including porn sites. The phrase has been co-opted into America-speak without the slightest shred of its original meaning. Here is a quote from E. F. :
Schumacher was one of the first economists to question “growth”. He points out that our economy is unsustainable because natural resources are treated as expendable income when in fact they should be treated as capital since they are not renewable and thus subject to depletion. Schumacher's philosophy is one of "enoughness," appreciating both human needs, limitations and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village-based economics, which he later termed “Buddhist Economics.” He faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that “growth is good”, and that “bigger is better”. Schumacher said that “the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption.”
Over the years I have had quite a number of arguments with local and not-so-local business people about “growth”. I always have maintained that growth is not necessary in a stable, income producing enterprise that budgets for depreciation of capital, takes into account changing resource use, etc. I usually get a horrified response akin to those anti-vampire crossed fingers. Since I can’t gain any headway, I always retreat. When I have found my safe retreat founded on growing with nature, not percentage growth of GNP, I wonder if these same people will be attacking me with guns because I am the only one with food.
The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged believe that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.(Get the May 08 Harpers Magazine and read the rest--it's worth it. I do feel that any concerned American who considers her/himself educated should have an acquaintance with Wendell Barry’s writings. The Gift of Good Land should be required reading in schools.)
This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to become as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!--still driving.)
But how many times does all this need to be said? Why do we keep jazzing ourselves up with hubristic desires for unlimited growth? Why do we keep on with our smug American self assurance that we will figure this all out and still be able to water the golf course and drive the BMW? Does anyone remember E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful? That was published 35 years ago; at the time I read it and thought “This is earthshaking! Now things will begin to change!” But if you Google “small is beautiful” today you will get one or two references to the book and a whole lot of other crap, including porn sites. The phrase has been co-opted into America-speak without the slightest shred of its original meaning. Here is a quote from E. F. :
A modern economist is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.
Schumacher was one of the first economists to question “growth”. He points out that our economy is unsustainable because natural resources are treated as expendable income when in fact they should be treated as capital since they are not renewable and thus subject to depletion. Schumacher's philosophy is one of "enoughness," appreciating both human needs, limitations and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village-based economics, which he later termed “Buddhist Economics.” He faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that “growth is good”, and that “bigger is better”. Schumacher said that “the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption.”
Over the years I have had quite a number of arguments with local and not-so-local business people about “growth”. I always have maintained that growth is not necessary in a stable, income producing enterprise that budgets for depreciation of capital, takes into account changing resource use, etc. I usually get a horrified response akin to those anti-vampire crossed fingers. Since I can’t gain any headway, I always retreat. When I have found my safe retreat founded on growing with nature, not percentage growth of GNP, I wonder if these same people will be attacking me with guns because I am the only one with food.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
psi
Here we go again. . .
I’m doing some reading for a counseling course I’m taking and find myself thinking a lot about the “psi establishment”. (In my college days we used the Greek letter psi (ψ ) to stand for Psychology and “psi establishment” is a good blanket term for all psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, etc.) I keep being struck both by these professionals’ sincere desire to help a group of very unhappy people and the necessary judgementalism that accompanies any definition of mental health. We all think we know what a happy and well-adjusted person looks like, but do we really know how to define what a not-so-well-adjusted person should do to get there? I can’t help wondering what the true meaning is of a phrase like this: “shows punctuated sensitivity to the feelings of others, extreme loyalty, isolation, and an appearance of superiority that masks feelings of low-self-worth.” (referring to codependency). There are a lot of words there that may have a vaguely agreed-upon locus of definitions to those in the field, but you can’t get around the fact that this type of concept is like a quantum cloud of electrons—impossible to accurately define a location in time or space. Each of the terms in that sentence is a covert judgement, a method of analysis that uses a culture-specific net of concepts to portray an incredibly complicated human personality in very large pixels.
If you wish to call psychology a science, you will have the support of all in the psi establishment, but a good deal of argument from those in the physical sciences. It really is a branch of philosophy (maybe we should call it Applied Philosophy) and as such uses words, and concepts defined in words, as its tools. You cannot do philosophy or psychology without language. And it goes without saying (!) that the language you choose will strongly define the concepts you use. I used to get into arguments with psychology professors about their blanket statements applying certain terms and definitions of behavior to all of humanity when I already knew for a fact from my time in Japan that such was not the case. But it really ruins your cherished notion of being a “scientist” when somebody tells you that your carefully constructed theories of toilet-training angst are meaningless in Asia.
If nothing else in learning a language as different as Japanese, I have learned to mistrust definitions of words and the concepts they supposedly represent. There really is not a one-to-one correspondence between words in English and non-Indoeuropean languages. Here are some Japanese words followed by words in English that are commonly used to translate them. Can you really understand the word by reading the translation?
気 (ki or chi in Chinese)--spirit, air, feeling, strength
心 (kokoro)--heart, center, soul, feelings
わかる（解,分,判） (wakaru)--to understand, plot, divide, judge, measure
あまえ (amae)--dependency, sweetness, childishness,
(Can those of you who don’t have a Mac see the Kanji characters on your screen? If not, please install the Japanese language support for your Windows program. Try this link: Or get a Mac--it will make your life so much more enjoyable!)
I have come to realize through long exposure to such words and in getting used to a lot of what from my English-speaking mind is a lot of variability in meaning, that I also no longer really understand what is meant by English words such as “will”, self-worth”, love”, “confidence”, “self-identity”, the list could go on. If I’m not careful at times my central language processor completely breaks down and I find myself tongue-tied and unable to think, let alone choose appropriate words.
Which brings it around again to psi stuff—I truly believe there is a lot of good in people trying to help other people with their problems (define “problem”) and that those who think they can define emotional and mental health should try to do so and in the process try to help those who, by anybody’s definition, are not mentally healthy or happy. But they should never lose sight of the fact that anything they say, any terms or concepts they attempt to use to portray their patients or the path they feel their patients should follow, are very slippery stones with wide cracks between. Only the narrow-minded and the chauvinistic can truly have the balls to tell another human exactly how they should behave, what they should do, how they should live their life. Yet those who find themselves in the “helping professions” must do this on a daily basis. The good ones do it with a large dose of humility and awareness of the one insurmountable monad of a fact that all these words are nothing more than bees and tsetse flies buzzing around our heads, that in the end there are no words, all is one, the universe exists as it is, problems or no problems, sanity or no sanity.
I’m doing some reading for a counseling course I’m taking and find myself thinking a lot about the “psi establishment”. (In my college days we used the Greek letter psi (ψ ) to stand for Psychology and “psi establishment” is a good blanket term for all psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, etc.) I keep being struck both by these professionals’ sincere desire to help a group of very unhappy people and the necessary judgementalism that accompanies any definition of mental health. We all think we know what a happy and well-adjusted person looks like, but do we really know how to define what a not-so-well-adjusted person should do to get there? I can’t help wondering what the true meaning is of a phrase like this: “shows punctuated sensitivity to the feelings of others, extreme loyalty, isolation, and an appearance of superiority that masks feelings of low-self-worth.” (referring to codependency). There are a lot of words there that may have a vaguely agreed-upon locus of definitions to those in the field, but you can’t get around the fact that this type of concept is like a quantum cloud of electrons—impossible to accurately define a location in time or space. Each of the terms in that sentence is a covert judgement, a method of analysis that uses a culture-specific net of concepts to portray an incredibly complicated human personality in very large pixels.
If you wish to call psychology a science, you will have the support of all in the psi establishment, but a good deal of argument from those in the physical sciences. It really is a branch of philosophy (maybe we should call it Applied Philosophy) and as such uses words, and concepts defined in words, as its tools. You cannot do philosophy or psychology without language. And it goes without saying (!) that the language you choose will strongly define the concepts you use. I used to get into arguments with psychology professors about their blanket statements applying certain terms and definitions of behavior to all of humanity when I already knew for a fact from my time in Japan that such was not the case. But it really ruins your cherished notion of being a “scientist” when somebody tells you that your carefully constructed theories of toilet-training angst are meaningless in Asia.
If nothing else in learning a language as different as Japanese, I have learned to mistrust definitions of words and the concepts they supposedly represent. There really is not a one-to-one correspondence between words in English and non-Indoeuropean languages. Here are some Japanese words followed by words in English that are commonly used to translate them. Can you really understand the word by reading the translation?
気 (ki or chi in Chinese)--spirit, air, feeling, strength
心 (kokoro)--heart, center, soul, feelings
わかる（解,分,判） (wakaru)--to understand, plot, divide, judge, measure
あまえ (amae)--dependency, sweetness, childishness,
(Can those of you who don’t have a Mac see the Kanji characters on your screen? If not, please install the Japanese language support for your Windows program. Try this link: Or get a Mac--it will make your life so much more enjoyable!)
I have come to realize through long exposure to such words and in getting used to a lot of what from my English-speaking mind is a lot of variability in meaning, that I also no longer really understand what is meant by English words such as “will”, self-worth”, love”, “confidence”, “self-identity”, the list could go on. If I’m not careful at times my central language processor completely breaks down and I find myself tongue-tied and unable to think, let alone choose appropriate words.
Which brings it around again to psi stuff—I truly believe there is a lot of good in people trying to help other people with their problems (define “problem”) and that those who think they can define emotional and mental health should try to do so and in the process try to help those who, by anybody’s definition, are not mentally healthy or happy. But they should never lose sight of the fact that anything they say, any terms or concepts they attempt to use to portray their patients or the path they feel their patients should follow, are very slippery stones with wide cracks between. Only the narrow-minded and the chauvinistic can truly have the balls to tell another human exactly how they should behave, what they should do, how they should live their life. Yet those who find themselves in the “helping professions” must do this on a daily basis. The good ones do it with a large dose of humility and awareness of the one insurmountable monad of a fact that all these words are nothing more than bees and tsetse flies buzzing around our heads, that in the end there are no words, all is one, the universe exists as it is, problems or no problems, sanity or no sanity.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Gloom and Doom
Take 10 acres of lush woodland full of nut trees. There are 10 squirrels living there. Construct a tight squirrel-proof fence around it and also arrange to keep out all squirrel predators. You think you have created a Squirrel Paradise. As long as the rain keeps falling and the plant systems are not disrupted, there will be nuts for squirrels to eat and the squirrel population will grow. Eventually there may be 1000 squirrels in your preserve and things may start changing. Nuts will get scarcer, trees to live in will be contested for. Squirrel culture will change perceptively. Maybe squirrels will learn to form extended family gangs to protect resources for fellow DNA sharers, little squirrel armies with swords made from haw-thorns. Eventually they may be forced to augment the now scarce nuts with tree bark in their diet which might cause the trees to become less healthy and produce fewer nuts. As the trees stop being able to reproduce because there are no un-eaten nuts, there will be a crisis and many squirrels and many trees will die, maybe all of them.
At any point in this process which took dozens of squirrel generations, did a squirrel or two ever stand on a fallen log and propose remedies or solutions? Maybe one group of believers saw clearly the need to breach the fence—after many attempts ending only in broken teeth, they retreated to a religion waiting for the coming of a squirrel Moses with a pair of wire cutters. Maybe another group taught that all could live on fewer nuts, that if everyone would consume less, there would be enough for all. But these squirrels were just as horny as all the other squirrels and kept producing babies, so their efforts too were doomed. Maybe one group did in fact preach abstinence and vowed to have only two children; unfortunately after a number of years they died out and the squirrellier squirrels’ kids predominated. As the last nut tree sapling was nibbled off at the roots, the starving nibbler, if he thought about it at all, just assumed that somewhere in the 10 acres there were other shoots to chew and that somehow his genetic will to survive would keep him going. In the end, the limits imposed by the squirrels brain were in fact the limits for the squirrel world. Because squirrels had evolved to occupy unlimited territory, no squirrel could understand the inarguable fact of the fence and what it implied.
We are just in this past year or so, after Al Gore, moving out of the realm of denial. We can see the fence now. Those who saw it 30 years ago are shaking their heads in bewilderment mixed with relief and hoping it is not too late. But we all are still convinced that our wonderfully resourceful squirrel-brains can find a way out. We design recycling programs, we preach “sustainability”, we are convinced that the word “Green” has a magic to it that will solve our problem. But our brains evolved to search for and sequester resources on the Serengeti. We have a ferocious need to reproduce that literally takes over and makes us crazy. Our brains knew no fences on the savannah, and now, in our deepest mind, there is no concept for voluntarily giving up in the quest to dominate resources for our offspring. The word “survive” means literally to “live over” or to “live on top of”, in other words to win out, to live at the expense of others who will die. We really have no conceptual model for how to proceed in this kind of crisis, how to cooperate in self-denial. We easily fantasize escape-- any mammal trapped in a cage will try to escape, sometimes severely wounding itself in the process. We have strong instincts for flight but we don’t understand how the latch works, in fact we don’t even know where the door is, we just tear our fingernails off on the wire. The exponential increase in substance abuse problems, ethnic violence, general craziness, is just the normal mammalian response to increased stress in the environment. Drug use is an attempt at the individual level to medicate the psychosis induced by a crowded struggle for resources, ethnic competition an attempt by one DNA lineage to out-compete others. It is very possible that the crisis we can see ahead of us has no answer that we can conceive of, perhaps our evolution limits us too much.
Maybe only absolutely selfless involvement in the tiny ameliorations of tiny parts of the problem is all we have left. Even if we and our offspring are all going to die someday, the only way to die sanely seems to be to keep trying. The image of anonymous monks piling victims of the Black Plague into carts comes to mind. Maybe it helped in the long run. There will be more Plagues; we will need more monks.
At any point in this process which took dozens of squirrel generations, did a squirrel or two ever stand on a fallen log and propose remedies or solutions? Maybe one group of believers saw clearly the need to breach the fence—after many attempts ending only in broken teeth, they retreated to a religion waiting for the coming of a squirrel Moses with a pair of wire cutters. Maybe another group taught that all could live on fewer nuts, that if everyone would consume less, there would be enough for all. But these squirrels were just as horny as all the other squirrels and kept producing babies, so their efforts too were doomed. Maybe one group did in fact preach abstinence and vowed to have only two children; unfortunately after a number of years they died out and the squirrellier squirrels’ kids predominated. As the last nut tree sapling was nibbled off at the roots, the starving nibbler, if he thought about it at all, just assumed that somewhere in the 10 acres there were other shoots to chew and that somehow his genetic will to survive would keep him going. In the end, the limits imposed by the squirrels brain were in fact the limits for the squirrel world. Because squirrels had evolved to occupy unlimited territory, no squirrel could understand the inarguable fact of the fence and what it implied.
We are just in this past year or so, after Al Gore, moving out of the realm of denial. We can see the fence now. Those who saw it 30 years ago are shaking their heads in bewilderment mixed with relief and hoping it is not too late. But we all are still convinced that our wonderfully resourceful squirrel-brains can find a way out. We design recycling programs, we preach “sustainability”, we are convinced that the word “Green” has a magic to it that will solve our problem. But our brains evolved to search for and sequester resources on the Serengeti. We have a ferocious need to reproduce that literally takes over and makes us crazy. Our brains knew no fences on the savannah, and now, in our deepest mind, there is no concept for voluntarily giving up in the quest to dominate resources for our offspring. The word “survive” means literally to “live over” or to “live on top of”, in other words to win out, to live at the expense of others who will die. We really have no conceptual model for how to proceed in this kind of crisis, how to cooperate in self-denial. We easily fantasize escape-- any mammal trapped in a cage will try to escape, sometimes severely wounding itself in the process. We have strong instincts for flight but we don’t understand how the latch works, in fact we don’t even know where the door is, we just tear our fingernails off on the wire. The exponential increase in substance abuse problems, ethnic violence, general craziness, is just the normal mammalian response to increased stress in the environment. Drug use is an attempt at the individual level to medicate the psychosis induced by a crowded struggle for resources, ethnic competition an attempt by one DNA lineage to out-compete others. It is very possible that the crisis we can see ahead of us has no answer that we can conceive of, perhaps our evolution limits us too much.
Maybe only absolutely selfless involvement in the tiny ameliorations of tiny parts of the problem is all we have left. Even if we and our offspring are all going to die someday, the only way to die sanely seems to be to keep trying. The image of anonymous monks piling victims of the Black Plague into carts comes to mind. Maybe it helped in the long run. There will be more Plagues; we will need more monks.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Food thoughts
Just read Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food--An Eater’s Manifesto, courtesy of friend Peter. It is always a nice pat on the back to read a book that says what you have been thinking for years but in a knowledgeable, well-researched and documented way. “Yeah! That’s right!”—team membership, signing on to a believe system, powerful emotions for apes. The whole book is summed up in the first sentence: “Eat food, not much, mostly plants.” As Pollan says, if you understand this you don’t need to read the book. A fortune could be made in attractively designed refrigerator magnets with this quote.
I have been harping at my extended family for years about the first of these three rules. The problem is “food”. There is a basic difference between food and food-like products. A while ago I proposed the rule that nothing belongs in our pantry or fridge if it has an ingredients label. In the U.S. that means anything sold in a package. The food-like products industry has not yet figured out how to adulterate and addify things like a head of cabbage or bulk brown rice and therefore these things aren’t labeled (yet). The mega-corporations also don’t make much money on these things so you don’t see ads for cabbage on TV. If someone has figured out how to package something, they have also figured out a lot of processes to do to that item which your body might not like. Shelf-life and mouth-feel become more important than nutrition, additives mean patentability; there is absolutely no reason to believe that each and every item on a long ingredients list was put there so the food-like product would make you healthy and happy. They only want you to eat more and buy more, so in fact, if there is less nutrition in it and if it sufficiently manipulates your taste buds with potent artificial chemicals, you will feel the need to eat more and your instincts will serve to create more profit for Conagra.
Throughout my adulthood I have always thought that my instincts about what I should eat at any given time should be listened to. Over the years remembering what makes me feel healthy and what doesn’t have built up a system that works for me. That has meant, after listening to my body’s instinct that it REALLY needs another beer or a huge pile of French fries, I am honest enough with myself the next day to say: “Don’t do that again!” Eventually, by the time age creeps in, you start listening to the day-after voice. It helps to get old and less healthy—the robustness we all have as 20-somethings masks a lot of toxic effects, plus there is that thing: “I’m so tough and cool I can even get away with poisoning myself with this whiskey and cigarette.” By age 50 I was sensitive enough to accidental poisonings that I could fine tune my intake a little bit; finding that I did not like sleepless nights and unexplained hangovers, I stopped eating things that came in boxes or had labels with more than 2 ingredients . . . and switched to organic beer (don’t laugh!). It also helps that I refuse to waste my time being titillated by TV ads trying to make me hungry when I'm not. Of course in our culture the no-label rule is too strict--we no longer have the space, time, or cultural resources to be self-sufficient peasants and we must shop at the grocery store with our precious time and cash. Few of us can press our own oil, brew our own soy sauce—you have to buy the packaged version. Eating at all in modern America demands you spend almost all your waking hours filling a job, earning money for the mortgage and the health insurance (let’s not even go into why we need health insurance). But I firmly believe (and my innate curmudgeon-ness helps me stick to it) that we should NOT trust the food giants and NOT put packaged food into our mouths.
Many of the facts and figures in Pollan’s book are scary, but not unexpected. We all seem to instinctively know about the decreasing nutrient levels in all our food, it goes along with the common world view of most thinking people that “everything is getting really fucked up.” He mentions an article in a produce packagers’ trade journal which celebrated the experimental evidence that apples, spinach, and other produce have only 1/3 the nutrients they did 50 years ago—the journal smugly crowed that this would cause Americans to need to eat more produce. As many of us have also learned to do, he roundly condemns the “Western diet” (no flour, no sugar). He takes us through a brief history of nutritional science, letting us clearly see how tentative any scientific conclusions are about what the human body needs to be healthy. A quick overview of the major scientific studies on diet and health makes you want to either laugh or throw up in disgust. Like Pollan’s previous books, this is a good read and necessary information for those attempting to exist in this modern world.
If you don’t think much about what you eat and what you therefore are, or if you do think a lot about this and want some corroboration, read it.
I have been harping at my extended family for years about the first of these three rules. The problem is “food”. There is a basic difference between food and food-like products. A while ago I proposed the rule that nothing belongs in our pantry or fridge if it has an ingredients label. In the U.S. that means anything sold in a package. The food-like products industry has not yet figured out how to adulterate and addify things like a head of cabbage or bulk brown rice and therefore these things aren’t labeled (yet). The mega-corporations also don’t make much money on these things so you don’t see ads for cabbage on TV. If someone has figured out how to package something, they have also figured out a lot of processes to do to that item which your body might not like. Shelf-life and mouth-feel become more important than nutrition, additives mean patentability; there is absolutely no reason to believe that each and every item on a long ingredients list was put there so the food-like product would make you healthy and happy. They only want you to eat more and buy more, so in fact, if there is less nutrition in it and if it sufficiently manipulates your taste buds with potent artificial chemicals, you will feel the need to eat more and your instincts will serve to create more profit for Conagra.
Throughout my adulthood I have always thought that my instincts about what I should eat at any given time should be listened to. Over the years remembering what makes me feel healthy and what doesn’t have built up a system that works for me. That has meant, after listening to my body’s instinct that it REALLY needs another beer or a huge pile of French fries, I am honest enough with myself the next day to say: “Don’t do that again!” Eventually, by the time age creeps in, you start listening to the day-after voice. It helps to get old and less healthy—the robustness we all have as 20-somethings masks a lot of toxic effects, plus there is that thing: “I’m so tough and cool I can even get away with poisoning myself with this whiskey and cigarette.” By age 50 I was sensitive enough to accidental poisonings that I could fine tune my intake a little bit; finding that I did not like sleepless nights and unexplained hangovers, I stopped eating things that came in boxes or had labels with more than 2 ingredients . . . and switched to organic beer (don’t laugh!). It also helps that I refuse to waste my time being titillated by TV ads trying to make me hungry when I'm not. Of course in our culture the no-label rule is too strict--we no longer have the space, time, or cultural resources to be self-sufficient peasants and we must shop at the grocery store with our precious time and cash. Few of us can press our own oil, brew our own soy sauce—you have to buy the packaged version. Eating at all in modern America demands you spend almost all your waking hours filling a job, earning money for the mortgage and the health insurance (let’s not even go into why we need health insurance). But I firmly believe (and my innate curmudgeon-ness helps me stick to it) that we should NOT trust the food giants and NOT put packaged food into our mouths.
Many of the facts and figures in Pollan’s book are scary, but not unexpected. We all seem to instinctively know about the decreasing nutrient levels in all our food, it goes along with the common world view of most thinking people that “everything is getting really fucked up.” He mentions an article in a produce packagers’ trade journal which celebrated the experimental evidence that apples, spinach, and other produce have only 1/3 the nutrients they did 50 years ago—the journal smugly crowed that this would cause Americans to need to eat more produce. As many of us have also learned to do, he roundly condemns the “Western diet” (no flour, no sugar). He takes us through a brief history of nutritional science, letting us clearly see how tentative any scientific conclusions are about what the human body needs to be healthy. A quick overview of the major scientific studies on diet and health makes you want to either laugh or throw up in disgust. Like Pollan’s previous books, this is a good read and necessary information for those attempting to exist in this modern world.
If you don’t think much about what you eat and what you therefore are, or if you do think a lot about this and want some corroboration, read it.
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