Cactus Juice

Theology: Relevance and Irrelevance

I was commenting to a friend the other day that I find theology as irrelevant to my life as most Americans do, as even theologians themselves often have come to expect their craft to be.  When it's about commas and semicolons rather than ideas, you know the art is dead.

However, for several years theology was extremely important to me, and now things have changed. My adolescent obsessions with theology were driven by a need for a basis of a theory of justice.  I was experiencing the usual adolescent vertigo found after sitting on the fence of nihilism; existential freedom meant the end of meaning rather than the beginning.  I didn't have enough of a sense of worth to understand that freedom meant I could, I must, create my own meaning.  Teetering on the fence, there was nothing that could give me a foundation in understanding justice, that is, in finding an evaluation of my own worth and the courage to value myself and insist that others do so as well.

Theology created a sense of stability that surrounded the intolerable instability of day-to-day life.  I was still sitting on the fence of nihilism, but now it was a very big fence with the stability of millennia and I was just a bee buzzing in a small jar left on a post somewhere.  As a bee can sting an elephant, I found the power to demand the humane respect I desperately need at the time.

Here at 32, the void no longer threatens.  I have created my own sense of order, and of worth.  Looking back, I see that the greatest comfort in those old days wasn't from theology properly understood, but from various threads of religious superstition that can be found loosely attached to theology.

My internal order comes from the knowledge that I and my actions matter.  Is that theology?  Of course my existentialism supports this knowledge as much as my Christianity does.  My development co-existed with a Christian world-view, so I'm not sure what would have happened without it.  Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Sartre said an ethical life requires commitment (involvement) to place and time.  Jesus said, "Feed my sheep."  My ethical measuring rod comes from the first two ideas more than from the third.  "Ensure the sheep have access to food."  Ethics that start here are the only relevance and theology doesn't have much more to say on the topic.

"Theology," so called, makes me angry.  It is mostly used as a game to justify certain superstitions and certain philosophies and to separate people from God.  As has been noted time and time again, God is not in the theology; he is in the sheep.  Yet religions compete on their superstitious margins.  "I don't know," usually is the right answer in theology, yet it is not an acceptable answer when theology is being used as a touchstone for philosophical certainty.  The only use I see for those who are meant to be leaders in religious life being well trained in theology is that they may (if they are truly trained well) be able to spot an absurd idea when they see it and identify it as such before it gets out of hand.  Large denominations and their checks on lunacy are a good thing.

The anti-intellectualism of religious extremism isn't unwarranted.  Intellectualism is a sphere different from theology.  No amount of intellectualism will get you to "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6)  Intellectualism can take that kernel and run around in circles with it, but by then you have left the realm of theology.  To make theology the totality of intellectual life is sad.  God has given so much, from the earthworm to the ability to create ethical theory, but God himself is truly hidden.  Theology is a shockingly tiny topic; there just isn't much to say.  "through a glass, darkly," (1 Corinthians 13:12) indeed.

Part of the viciousness of modern Christian piety can be traced to religion being turned to revolve around what you think rather than what you do.  Consideration of what you do has been stripped away for a variety of reasons, legitimate and not.  The final illegitimacy is to turn the focus to thinking about topics having nothing to do with the lives of most of the people.  I am addressing, of course, the focus on homosexuality and abortion.  This is a sign of theology at its most irrelevant.

And so my Episcopalian friend was surprised that I walked away from a rather sour article ("Turning Away from Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church," Harper's Magazine, June 2008) feeling uplifted.  It was the absolutely boredom the article created in me that turned my attention back to God.  Pages of writing about church and "theology" which had nothing to do with God or theology.  After reading, I had a flash of clarity about how absurd the discussion is (In the context of theology.  In the context of civil society and the philosophy of politics these issues are very important.).  I felt quite liberated from theology!  The question continually posed to religion in America is how it shall restrict itself from civil society.  As many a religious person has pointed out, the biggest worry is quite the reverse.  So little of our lives is about theology; so much of cultural mores influence our experience of "religion."  And it all creates a confusing fog around that very tiny kernel that is theology.

Today, theology gives me one thing: that understanding of the value of human beings that is fundamental to any theory of justice.  And after that, theology is about what I do rather than what I think.

The other day in church I shivered to read Psalm 31 aloud; a Psalm that I read many times at midnight as a young woman and which has always held great significance for me.  In general, to think that one may call upon this Psalm in good conscience most clearly represents the self-gratifying superstitions of modern Western Christianity.  The concept discussed in the psalm is guaranteed to break against you.  Your best hope is that it might break for you a few times.  Or, at least that would be your hope should you ever have the misfortune to need it.  The woman or child trapped in exploitation; the innocent man who has received a death sentence.  We are thrown to the lions, but rarely- far more often we are the lions.  The majority of days, one would do well to read this psalm as a warning.  Nearly the only true theology that can be taught is repentance and trembling before the value of souls other than our own.  When theology is relevant, it's generally at the moment one would rather it not.

On Super-Specialing and Self-Sabotage.

Why is it that we so cling to the super-special reasons why each one of us cannot have health, cannot have happiness, and cannot have success?  The appearance of strange notions in current self-help literature is a response to a true problem in our culture.  Basic, obvious, solutions to suffering are routinely rejected out of hand.  To grasp the simplest of solutions to life is seen as unusual and even heroic.  What the heck is going on here?!

One aspect of our current cultural climate is that we wish to make evil spirits our pets.  Ever since Freud, we have been defined by our afflictions.  Affliction, prior to this point, was unwaveringly woeful.  No one thought to meet Achilles on the battlefield and point out that his one area of moral danger was an opportunity for him to fully experience his humanity.  No one suggested to Job that he had been "given a trial" to learn from.  Rather, Job's suffering reveals a character which he has already formed.  These days, Elizabeth Wurtzel revels in her weakness while Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir rot on the vine.  Here's a clue:  Weakness is just not that interesting; each of us was issued plenty of it at birth.

In this post-industrial world, we are meant to express ourselves as individuals in a world-wide culture where it is difficult even to get 15 minutes of fame.  Being the crazy cat-lady in no-where, Wisconsin isn't good enough; you have to be the craziest cat lady in the entire world.  Gaining notoriety through rare excellence is unlikely, so we turn to rare affliction.  Wurtzel having her latest drug stash FedEx'ed to her latest writing venue.  Pathetically, these afflictions are quite a bit less than rare.  From addiction to family dysfunction, the same story is repeated a few million times.

To add to all of this, the Western World in 2008 is the most superstitious it has been in at least 200 years, and perhaps one of the most superstitious cultures of all time.  Magical psychology has replaced ordered ethical thought.  Christianity, frequently dismissed as a kind of superstition, has an ordering of the natural and the supernatural which brought about some of the greatest flowerings of human thought and advancement.  However, there are broad trends of Christianity, in America at least, which are drivel that rivals the most backwards back-desert Mullah that they would like to preach against.  The superstition cloaks itself in science- this isn't the Flat Earth Society; this is the radio preacher that gives his listeners exact Prozac dosages to request from the doctor (true story).

The media market reverberates with the echoes of these cultural trends.  A generation after Archie Bunker, on any given night you can select from about a dozen uninteresting family dramas.  In the commercials, we now have "nicotine receptors in the brain" that are responsible for your smoking habit, though you'd be hard-pressed to find such a "receptor" in an actual brain cell.  For a while now the anti-smoking pharmaceuticals have focused on your likelihood of failure more than your opportunities for success.

Re-direction to success is generally not the goal.  Success --practical, reasonable, success-- is dull.  Affliction is dressed up to be much more exciting than it actually is, more exciting than excellence and much more exciting than success.  I fall into this trap as much as anyone else (Obviously- I have a blog which partly revolves around my obesity affliction.)  If I had a normal BMI, I'd just be a slow, dull, distance runner.  One of the few million others that completed a half-marathon this year.  At 232 pounds, I'm something special.  And that's difficult to give up.

Popping in behind this culture of "super-special" affliction, of late I've noticed an explosion in the use of the absurd term "self-sabotage".  It has all the earmarks of a darling of this culture: magical psychology, lack of personal responsibility, and affliction.  It would be easy to dismiss the thought pattern I just identified in myself as "self-sabotage."  I guess the way you explain it is, "I don't really want to lose weight."  But that's only part of the picture, which is one of the problems with the concept of self-sabotage.  Using the term is one way to refuse to think through and take responsibility for one's actual decision making process.  In my case, I have to finish the sentence: "I don't really want to lose weight because I want to be a special fat person rather than an undistinguished thin person."

All rational people, and all irrational people too (such as psychotics), engage in decision making patterns exactly like this; they make decisions designed to make their life better.  There is no evil spirit, no magical psychology.  I have made a choice.  What can I do to make a different choice?

There are lists and lists of techniques to help me make a different choice, and I'd like to put them into two categories: those which focus on affliction and those which do not.  Techniques that do not focus on affliction but rather focus on health, on self-actualization, on successful outcomes, are the best.  Thus the exotic solutions in the current crop of self-help books such a the "law of attraction."  For more sedate acknowledgment of this principle, note that the AA Big Book says, "We ceased to struggle."  The New Testament advises not to "kick against the pricks."

Needless to say, these are not the solutions that are the most popular.  When it comes to controlling eating, rather than act like a healthy eater (such as on a Weight Watchers program), "dieting" systems that interact with, and circle around, and focus on, and make war with disordered eating are the most popular.  There's a whole circle of extremism in Overeater's Anonymous that I would say does the same thing.

Back to the question: What should I do?  To say that I shouldn't engage in self-sabotage is meaningless since I'm in fact not trying to make my life worse, rather, I'm trying to make my life better by having a special accomplishment. I am a healthy animal, a rational person, and I make decisions for a reason.  And not just any reason, but a healthy and completely normal desire to treat myself well and have a good life.  I can take responsibility for my own decisions.

What would it look like to "not engage in self-sabotage"?  I guess it means nothing more than "Just don't overeat!"  In response to that simplistic message, I will quote the Buddha, who said that you cannot "press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and force your brain a certain direction."

Here some different decisions I am going to make:  I am going to focus more on actual success and less on affliction.  Perhaps you will be hearing more about my running accomplishments and less on my eating struggles.  I have set myself up for a potential running failure that will be caused by my obesity, entering a marathon where I may not be able to make the time cut-off. Affliction is a lot less fun when it actually curtails the possibility of accomplishments and the reality of experience beats magical psychology every time.  There are no evil spirits lurking around the corner, there is just the reality of conflicted decision making and the burden of heavy cultural influences toward making the wrong decisions.  My affliction is not going to be my pet.

A Nation and a Culture Without Shame.

America doesn't do shame.  Our continual desire to hammer the Germans over Nazi atrocities juxtaposes badly with our inability to face the slave-holding roots of our own nation.  Presently, national righteousness over Burma stands in embarrassing juxtaposition to our recent bout with Hurricane Katrina.  American sheriffs refused to allow people to leave New Orleans, thereby violating the American constitution.  And yet they have neither been hanged for treason or (more realistically) jailed for civil rights violations.  The failures in Burma are not any different from what is expected out of that government.  America failed to be America, and therefore the shame should be that much greater.  I find Laura Bush's interest in Burma embarrassing in its shamelessness.  A First Lady should have political hobbies, but one of the core hobbies of First Lady is meant to be compassion upon the people of her own nation, and nothing much interesting has happened there.

What do I mean by "shame"?  Dictionary definitions tend to start with "dishonor."  And our repulsion with shame starts there as well.  In our culture, we see ourselves as ethical free agents.  You may have done something dishonorable, but you will never be a dishonorable person.  Brownie failed to manage the response to Katrina and caused untold suffering and death, but he's off managing horses again or something like that and he's whatever he is today.  His actions are things that happened at a point in time, but his essence is not made of those actions.  It's all about "what have you done lately."  Today there is more of a psychologized definition of shame which then creates it's own particular Christian response.  An in depth review of these pscyhologized definitions can be found here.  Since we don't believe that a person can have any action stick with them, "shame" becomes some rootless negativity in the emotionality.  Christians turn it into a psychologicalization of Original Sin and make Jesus the Christ the answer.

I tend to think of shame as a gap between guilt and reaction.  As the gap, it is somewhere between useless and destructive and almost always should be destroyed.  I have learned that shame feeds addiction.  One thing that was absolutely required in bring my eating problem under control was ending my shame about overeating.  There are doctors and various foolish people who think that can belittle or shame a person into losing weight, and it is an absolutely false concept.  Obesity is a painful and horrible condition.  It is medieval in the experience of punishment that it inflicts.  A person who deserves punishment could find little better than the discomforts of obesity.  I like to say, "No one ever hated themselves to health."

And yet, at the same time that I am rooting shame out of my own life, I do see a place for it.  Consider the following story:  a woman loans a digital camera to a friend.  The camera is about five years old and only takes 2 mega-pixel pictures.  You can't even get a 2 mega-pixel camera anymore, but she's happy with it and hasn't seen a need to buy one of the new 6 or higher mega-pixel cameras.  The friend falls in a lake while carrying the camera.  At first it seems that the camera is fine, and she returns it.  But as the camera dries out it ends up being ruined.  The memory card, which had never been backed up, is also ruined.  The friend is horrified and offers to replace the camera.  The owner of the camera looks up the price on a midrange camera and emails the price to the friend.

The friend is living off savings while she puts herself through college and still puts food on the plate for her two children.  She calls the owner of the camera and says that she'll make payments to make it right, but she should only pay for the replacement value of the camera.  What about half the price of the cheapest camera available?  At this point the owner of the camera is really starting to morn the pictures she lost on the memory card, and she feels insulted that her loss is being undervalued.  She insists that her friend isn't making things right, that she should pay for a midrange camera, since that was what she had bought to start with all those years ago.

I've heard various versions of this story many a time.  Just turn on Judge Judy and you can see it over and over again.  One person insisting on "ma rights," no matter what the hardship imposed upon the other person and no matter how reasonable an accident may have occurred.  I find this recourse to a legalistic form of morality brutish.  The fact is that if you have a camera for a long time, something is going to happen to it.  You might fall in a lake, you might leave it in a restaurant.  It is inevitable.  When you bought the camera, you knew that would happen.  It was probably part of the reason you didn't buy a more expensive camera.  It was also probably part of the reason you didn't trade up earlier: you were waiting for the inevitable day when you would be forced to buy a new one.  When you chose to let someone else use your toy, you passed along the possible risks to the other person.  Perhaps the person was more careless than you would have been, except your level of care included the risk of selecting that particular person.  So you are exactly equal in your level of care.  To think otherwise is absurdly self-righteous.

On that last point, you may decide that what I am actually talking about is humility.  In 12-step, humility is defined as placing yourself equally with others, neither above nor below them.  Laura Bush could possibly, with humility, comment on Burma.  Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles could have, with humility, chosen their re-marriage to each other.  With shame, Laura Bush must be silent on Burma.  The marriage of Charles and Camilla was accepted partly because of their shame in publicly stating their humility.  And the owner of the camera could use a little shame to step back from what in all legality she perhaps deserves.

When I make this argument, I am at this point told, "Well, what about personal responsibility?"  The point is that the hapless friend should take responsibility for her accident.  And yet, look at the responsibility of this camera owner that I have already outlined, including her economic choices in when and what to buy.  And, let's get real for a moment, do you really want to live in a world where you are going to be held "responsible" for everything you do?  Personal responsibility is a very popular concept... just so long as it's someone else's responsibility.

The addict has to renounce shame because it is about hopelessness.  Shame for the addict is moving into the gap between guilt and reaction permanently.  "Just for today" (a 12-step mantra) pulls him out of the gap and firmly onto the reaction of right here, right now.  And yet, conversely, shame can be a particular holder of hope.  The wisdom of millenia that grappled with Original Sin isn't something to lightly push aside.  The fact of shame and the fact of redemption says that we expect that we will get more than we deserve.  And with that hope, perhaps we can give more than others deserve.

Earlier this week, the CNN headline "Woman opens heart to man who slaughtered her family" captured my attention.  Through a process that involved public confession, a Rwandian Tutsi accepted the confession of a Hutu man who participated in the slaughter of her family.  She does business with his wife.  She told the CNN reporter that despite this man's confession and the importance of the confession process that "reconciliation would not have happened unless she had decided to open her heart and accept his pleas.  She said, "I am a Christian, and I pray a lot."  I cannot even begin to imagine how much prayer such a choice takes.  Because of her choice and the choices of others who have as much hope as she does, Rwanda is becoming an African success story.

It was her choice.  Forgiveness was entirely hers to give.  No human being had the right to demand it of her, only her Christ who shares in her suffering could ask such a thing.  A person, often a misguided Christian, who requires the forgiveness of others is making an evil and self-centered statement and is in danger of putting his own self as idol in the place of God.  I am completely in agreement with commentators such as Ayn Rand on this point: ethically, you do not have to give anything.  The only reason to demand someone give what they do not have to give is to be self-serving, and anyone who makes such demands is to be considered as a serpent.

But her choice certainly has brought me to reconsider the choices I have been making.  How many resentments do I cling to?  One is over a matter of about $200 that a close relative backed me into a corner on when I was destitute.  A "bait and switch" kind of a situation.  As I was forced to spend the money, with various family members peering over my shoulder, I didn't even know if the credit card would go through.  There was no cash, and I was on the last of my credit.  This incident is a decade old.  What makes the resent even more absurd is that the relative has matured in the meantime and would certainly never do such a thing today.  I have even received an apology of sorts.  I don't have to forgive, but a little more shame in realizing that I know I get more than I deserve might help me realize that about now is time to give more than someone else deserves.  I definitely know I don't want to get exactly what I deserve.

When the Journey of Life Means Nothing At All

I have recently read a not terribly good novel.  To protect the guilty, I I won't name the book, but part of the reason for reading it was to distinguish more clearly the particular qualities of Tolstoy Lied (blogged here).  I finished Tolstoy Lied feeling certain, first, that I could never write to that level of quality, and second, that a great novel requires much more than unusually good writing (because Tolstoy Lied, for all its attributes, will never be a great novel).  This recent read left me with the thought, "I could do that!"

I suspect that is what the author thought too, though instead of reaching that conclusion after reading a mediocre novel, she reached it after watching a mediocre action flick.  The novel has become the poor man's cinema: if you don't have access to the capitol and connections to create a movie, you can write a book instead.

The primary feature of these made-for-movies novels is that the climax and resolution of the story are conflated, and both are offered with considerably less detail than the build up.  The reader can envision the credits rolling up as they dump their popcorn on the theater floor and caste a sidelong glance at the sole movie goer who has been brought to tears.  Reality television also conflates climax and resolution, or more accurately it attempts to present climax as resolution.  Resolution is swept under the rug: the B-list career that follows the American Idol appearance will not be televised.  On the front end, a lifetime of artistic development and accomplishment are compressed into a few weeks.

But artists have always been dreamers.  Viewed as more insidious by me and my fat friends is Biggest Loser, where the contestants go from fat to svelte in one season.  They then disappear to that dark corner where the fat grows; 99% of people who lose 75 pounds or more regain it within 5 years even if they lost it on TV.

The peculiar heroism of the action movie, the determined heroism of the artist and the everyday heroism of the successful loser are turned into compressed actions devoid of decision and meaning.  This is not a template for heroism that the reader or viewer can apply to his or her own life.  When it comes to heroism, these dramas and plot lines that anyone could write turn into patterns of heroism that no one can live.

In the novel, the fatally ill heroine takes a few courageous steps that dramatically change the last days of her life and of the lives of those who she leaved behind.  At one point, she pointedly decides that she doesn't want to know the future effect of one of her decisions.  The reader never knows just why she made that decision to start with.  After her death, nothing has changed that much.  A few pawns have moved here and there on the chessboard, but how they feel and the possibility that in fact everything has been changed isn't communicated. Soft focus and cue the credits.

I'm not requiring all entertainment to be intellectually nuanced; shallow entertainment has existed since time immemorial and the very best entertainment --think Shakespeare-- is so true to life that it can be enjoyed as pure story or as something more.  I do think that the failures that I have highlighted in current entertainment are peculiar to our time.  In contrast, consider The Three Stooges.  Not serious work at all, but work that showed a simplified pattern of stimulus, reaction, and resolution.  Indeed, the extreme simplification was part of the comedy.  On the highbrow side post-modernism played with the link-up of those three items, but you can only play with them if you have their structure to launch off from.  Our current popular art seems to be losing the link-up.  As much as that is failing to tell our society something, it is also telling of something in our society that is failing.

Nashville Country Music Half-Marathon

Done.  My web page for the event, complete with drowned rat picture (um, it rained), is here.

Perversion of Truth: The FLDS Crisis in Texas

While I'm aware that there is no one block of mainstream Americans (or Canadians, since they're a part of this too), there are a set of elements in the media and in law enforcement / judiciary who are meant to speak with one voice for all of "us" as a block to "them", the FLDS.  At this point, these Representatives of us have created so many manipulations and perversions of the truth that they far better exemplify The People of the Lie (a concept created by The Road Less Traveled author M. Scott Peck) than do the FLDS people that they are trying to bring into line.  The FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs may have magnified the distrust that the FLDS reasonably feel after being persecuted for more than 100 years, but it took our legal representatives to make his prophecies come true.

(Image: girls being removed from their home on the first day of the raid.  Underage girls were taken and only their mothers were allowed to accompany them, so it is possible that the white haired lady in the background was being separated from her entire family.  Image from the FLDS website.)

I have recently seen and heard news articles criticizing a lifestyle which would result in women with such drawn and haggard faces.  To get up every morning, face a crowd of people who have taken your children, and do it with precisely placed hair and not a tear shed before the enemy takes a level of courage I cannot imagine.  There are photos available from happier times.  There are also photos available of young mothers in tears and supported on the arms of their elders.  CNN published an fashion article criticizing the hairstyles of the women, which it claimed were identical.  This text ran with a  photo of a group of drawn and haggard women, each with unique and complicated up-do.  The minutia of the lies is absurd.

The telephone call supposedly prompting the raid did not come from within the FLDS property (CNN reports, and has been reporting since last week), something investigators surely knew before the raid occurred.  The stated purpose of the raid was to follow up on the topic of the phone call, statutory rape of girls given in marriage.  The actual purpose of the raid appears to be the dismantling of the FLDS community, as evidenced by the fact that all children down to infants-in-arms have been removed from their parents.  In a move of relief, the judge has allowed nursing mothers to return to their children twice a day so long as they are supervised by a religious authority (she's suggesting the LDS oversee this in order to pull the women from the FLDS, something that baffles the LDS leaders who have made it clear they want no part in this).  In other words, the mandate the mainstream public was willing to give to the Texas authorities to protect pubescent girls has been expanded all the way from infants to the re-training of grown women. 

In a recent CNN online article about Carolyn Jessop, author of Escape, her tale of leaving the FLDS with her eight children, readers turned on her in their comments postings.  When a woman on the one hand talks about the supportive underground network of women within the FLDS community that she was privy to, and on the other hand claims that no one helped her with her children, not even on the days of their births, until the day she left the community and was provided a moment of rest by the first non-FLDS woman she housed with, you know she's playing tricks with her story.  Carolyn Jessop, by the way, is in Texas providing "cultural competency" to authorities for the sake of the people she has supported herself by vilifying.

One thing Carolyn Jessop claims is that the community used children as a threat to women: if you fail to follow the dictates of Jeffs, your children will be taken from you.  It took a woman not even of the community, a woman playing a hoax of unimaginably cruel proportions, and the willing accomplices in authority down there in Texas, to turn Jeff's prophecy into reality.  The compliance of the women over the last three weeks, starting with their willingness to leave their homes, has been called "voluntary," but what can voluntary possibly mean when their nursing infants are being held captive?

Another FLDS community has existed in the Canadian province of British Columbia since the days when polygamy was banned from the main LDS church (dismantling families obedient to that prophet and leaving their children illegitimate).  Yesterday the Attorney General of British Columbia was interviewed on the news show As It Happens.  He stated that the only difference between his response to that community and the response in Texas was that there had been no under-aged complainant in British Columbia.  At the time he said this, he had to have known that there is no underage complainant in Texas either.  He also stated that the American Consulate in British Columbia has been in contact with them over the years wishing for American citizens of the FLDS to participate in the American Census.  This the FLDS has been unwilling to do, fearing that the information would be used against them.  Probably fearing that the American and Canadian authorities were in cahoots to dismantle their community, which in fact they are.  The AG, by the way, is primarily concerned with the legality of polygamy.  His concern with statutory rape, like that of the Americans, is only in that it provides a legal hook for dismantling a polygamous community.

In Texas, failure to census has resulted in DNA testing of the entire community, the first legally enforced DNA testing of any community in the world.  While some of the actions in Texas mirror human rights violations in other countries --such as communities in South America where all children were removed from their parents and adopted out to more politically compliant families or aboriginal women in Australia who were removed from their tribes to be re-educated by white Protestants-- the DNA testing puts America on the cutting edge.  No one could call the fears of the FLDS irrational any more.  And as far as the AG of British Columbia is concerned, the Canadians have every wish to out-do America in this respect.

Groups who can see themselves ending up in this group are expressing concern.  The LDS church has refused to have anything to do with it.  Perhaps that Baptist church that allowed their sign to fly over the buses dismantling this community on the first day of the raid will someday regret their decision.  Rick Fisk is anti-charity in his evaluation of the FLDS, but he's outrage at the current events equals mine.  LDS blogger Russell Arben tried to be even-handed on Day 1, but eventually he had to agree that the details weren't making the Texas authorities "look very good" (and he links to other LDS bloggers on this topic).

(Image: Some of the firepower that was brought in to remove the girls from their homes.  Also from the FLDS website.)

The homeschoolers are worried that the attack on the FLDS can be turned into an attack on home and private schooling in general.  And the breastfeeders are pissed.  This has become an attack against women as decision makers in their own lives and against the power of women as mothers as much as it has become an attack against a polygamous society.  It is peculiar that the men and teenage boys have been left out of re-education.  Is it that men are considered uneducatable?  Or is it that women are still chattle, only to be controlled by the Texas authorities rather than by the conscience of their own religious sentiment?

At the FLDS website Captive FLDS Children you can donate directly to the FLDS organization.  Quite frankly, the finances of the FLDS leadership are curious and I'm not sure that is the best way to respond to the specific outrages of this event.  I have heard reports that the ACLU is providing legal support, but there is no information about this matter on their website.  For now, all a citizen can do is read the news with a critical eye, provide outrage when we are lied to by our own representatives, and demand that human rights abuses like this not be perpetrated in our name.  What's going on down there in Texas is being done to "them"; it must not be done in the name of "us."

Change a Behavior and Finding God May Follow

The Business Self Help Book That Helped Self

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything isn't deep philosophy.  It isn't say, The Varieties of Religious Experience, where we will end up today.  But it is one of the best books in the self-help / business segment genre that I've read- I'll be adding it my shelf with First, Break All The Rules (a book that every parent should read on behalf of their children and every high school student should read for herself), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Getting Things Done (issue these two books and a good secretarial manual to each new college graduate).

A self-help book must give a prescription for change, preferably in a numerated list.  Influencer offers in the categories of personal, social and structural solutions a prescription each in the motivational and ability categories- six total.  For best results, the authors recommend throwing all six solutions at a problem.  Best of all, the book explains that these methods can be used not only to influence others, but to influence yourself.  The example provided is of a man who lost a large amount of weight; a real person.

Another requirement of the self-help book is that it speak from authority.  Statistics and case histories are presented to illustrate that the author knows more than you do.  Much more.  Your job, therefore, is to not worry about thinking but to simply follow the prescription.  I did, and I've lost eight of the 23 pounds I've gained since my last VFT (Virgin Fat Territory- a lowest number ever seen in a weight loss journey).

The particular lesson that influenced me was told in the history of the fat guy: Influence must be aimed at behaviors.  A goal does not contain within it the elements of influence that will lead to the goal being achieved.  My New Year's Resolution included getting to onederland (a weight starting with a one) this year.  Twenty-three pounds up was not getting me there, but the desire to get 23 pounds down wasn't enough to make it happen. 

What was a behavior that I could change?  Overeating is so complicated.  There are so many different reasons I overeat.  I recently saw a study that claimed the average adult made more than 1,000 decisions per day about eating.  I've spent more than a decade now with therapists and overeating comrades analyzing my eating.  All I needed was one behavior.

I decided not to eat food the minute it was in my possession.  Specifically, I decided to wait five minutes from having food until eating it.  For the most part I haven't waited five entire minutes, but I have broken the cycle of grabbing food and stuffing it in my mouth.  While I wait, I "write-before-bite", another important behavior in controlling eating but not the primary goal.  I also do general journal writing, which has been missing from my life because I "don't have time" for that.  I've lost those eight pounds.  But most importantly, I feel in control of my eating again for the first time in more than six months.  One behavior.

Where God Comes In

I have been meaning to write a post about the limiting nature of happiness, to go with the post on the limiting nature of strength.  You know the old footprints poem: God is rarely seen in happy times.  For an addict having the time of her life with good health, a great job, and fabulous friendships, getting one inch past Step One into that God stuff is difficult.  I'm a proclaimed theist of the Christian variety, but my sense of spiritual connection has been at an all time low.

And yet notice what happened when I started pausing before my food.  My selected behavior was not prayer, which would be more directed toward God and would be another means of pausing, and yet the behavior of pausing just for the sake of the space caused me to start writing in my journal again.  Not in itself prayer or intended meditation, but a space for a spiritual experience.

William James considered this space to be important.  On a separate page I offer a lengthy excerpt (pp. 395 - 398) from The Varieties of Religious Experience for those who wish to read it.   It is an excellent defense of creating space for spirituality through practices of asceticism.  Waiting a few moments before eating is a tiny asceticism, but an effective one in a life that is just too easy.  James, referencing the ease of 1902, wrote:

...it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty amongst the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. (p. 403)

Poverty isn't just a matter of zip code, it's a matter of separation from ease.  It is an asceticism enforced or chosen by interactions with the outside world.  Avoidance of poverty at all costs includes the willingness to sell one's soul at any cost; this is what makes it a moral disease.  Single-minded devotion to the things of this world is what makes it a spiritual disease.

Many years ago I read an a book of existentialist psychology.  There is no possibility I could recall the identity of this book, but it made the argument that addiction is a kind of necrophilia- a chasing after death.  When I mentioned this to my therapist he was so startled that it ended the conversation immediately.  Reading James, I realize that the concept was wrong.  Addiction is a maladaptive chasing after life.  One thing that the fat on my body says is that I have provided life for myself.  One thing that choosing food before anything else says is that I choose nourishment and life.

American culture has made an idol worship of not dieing- we don't spend a quarter-million dollars on the last few days of life on accident (the cost of the typical American dieing process); it is the final sign of respect to the idol.  According to James, asceticism is about increasing life through an acceptance of death.  The final paragraph from the excerpt mentioned above:

The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion.  The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning. (pp. 397-398)

I happened to finish reading  The Varieties of Religious Experience this week.  Much of it is relevant to  my spiritual struggles, and I shall surely be devoting a post just to wrapping up my interaction with the book.  The book is wide and souring and exactly the kind of philosophy that is central to my existence as a human being, but I know that this specific topic required changing a behavior first and letting the meaning follow.  As I mentioned in a previous post, without any experience of life the book was meaningless.  With the experience of one tiny, very tiny, behavior a "metaphysical mystery" became clear.

The Price of Grain: Selling Morality by the Bushel

Today I took a six mile walk in a Canadian metropolis, and each bus stop that I passed had a banner advertisement for the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association.  On the grey city street, the ad was a dreamscape of flowery meadowland.  Given today's headline on CNN, "Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket," complete with grimy riot photographs, the advertisements seemed misplaced.  The contrast between the flowers and the riots was downright un-Canadian.  For today, the farmers behind the advertising have been stripped of their sunshine and daisies image and their bloody-handed ruthlessness had been laid bare.

"Ha," thinks the American of the slightly sappy Canadians, "That's what they get for being so gullible."  The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association would argue otherwise: they have posted some statistics showing how renewable fuels have little to do with food prices and how food prices are actually being driven up more by oil scarcity than by food scarcity.  And some other stuff that amounts to, "Those riots have nothing to do with us!  We're flowery meadowland!!"

Despite our supposed sophistication, us Americans are as gullible as our neighbors to the north.  We have a brick wall against marketing it is true, but brick walls aren't very responsive to change and the flow of capital is.  Since we can no longer be marketed to directly, pharmaceutical producers sell diseases rather than drugs and energy producers sell morality rather than megawatts.

All this comes on the heels of BwP reading The 48 Laws of Power (I hear there is going to be a follow-up post), me reading Influencer (there will be a post), and me finding myself in a snit because I didn't qualify for a government program that I thought was straightforward with no exclusions.  I felt betrayed, I felt gullible, I felt that as a citizen I had been voted off the island.  I was suddenly supremely aware that whatever ethics I had been sold (and ethics are very much about the sale, about creating a tribe that can be counted on to behave in a consistent way), that whatever sort of spiritual being having a human experience I may be, I am an animal in a world where every animal is out for their own interests.  Patriotism or any other interest in the public good suddenly seemed worse than that famous "last refuge of scoundrels;" it seemed the first pitfall of Pollyannas.

My mood has shifted by the realization that there are a lot of people, people much more powerful than me, who want a lot of the same things that I do.  Yes, there is a tug-of-war of power over every single thing that exists in the minds and/or the reality of the humans on this earth, but it is a tug-of-war which has a certain kind of stasis.  Value has been maximized.  Sell me meadows or sell me riots, the statistics suggest that actually the price of food hasn't changed that much.  Counting up the balance of power each morning, meadow-flower posters seem incongruously benign.  Counting up how little has changed from mornings past, giving quotidian ruthlessness a meadowland veneer doesn't seem so wrong.

The Addict as Object: trapped between moral condemnation and biological determinism

The cover of 03 March 2008 issue of Newsweek displayed the headline: "The Hunt for an Addiction Vaccine."  Inside, a more ominous title: "What Addicts Need."

"Addicts," author Jeneen Interlandi tells us, "like the rest of the public, need to recognize the fact that we are entering a new era in addiction treatment."  This comes near the end of the article, after a prim "...most people reading this article probably can think of someone they know who owes his or her life to it [AA, and by implication NA, OA, etc.].  Some readers themselves have surely benefited." (emphasis mine) The article may be about what addicts need, but it is written to the rest of the public.  Indeed, drawing a line between addict and non-addict is the focus of the article.

In order to enter the new era in addiction treatment, the biological determinism of addiction must be accepted.  Just like it was for depression.  Steven Paul, head of research for drug maker Eli Lilly (developer of Prozac), is quoted as saying, "There used to be a stigma attached to depression, too, but the development of Prozac put an end to that."

Yes and no.  The marketing of Prozac did indeed shift the stigma.  There is no longer moral condemnation for having depression.  Indeed, having depression and seeking treatment is now considered somewhat laudable.  What is not morally acceptable is being depressed; the stigma has shifted, not been obliterated.  If you are depressed, it is because you aren't willing to consume the pills offered.  Marketing depression as a biological disease has created the assumption that it is "highly treatable."  Many recipients of the message would probably be surprised to learn that only about half of patients treated with antidepressants report improvement of any kind (and so do about half of subject treated with a placebo), and fewer than that show a high level of improvement.  But a consequence of the message is that if you are depressed there is only one possible explanation: you haven't taken the treatment. And that is unacceptably irresponsible behavior.  Indeed, the tolerance for people exhibiting depression as a natural response to loss or grief seems to be on the decline.  College students upset over romantic breakups report being pressured by parents and peers to take antidepressant medication.  Widows reports being advised to, "See your doctor."

The article concludes, "...there's hope that science may some day help put that power [as opposed to the "powerlessness" that is Step One of the 12-Steps] within the reach of anyone who needs it.  And then who would choose not to grasp it, and begin the long war for sobriety-- a war without end, but one worth the fighting."

Once addiction is sold as biologically determined there will no longer be a stigma associated with being an addict, but there will always be a stigma associated with addiction.  That stigma will be wider than the stigma associated with powerlessness; it will be the moral condemnation of the irresponsible behavior of not grasping, of refusing to be treated (nevermind whether the treatment works or not), or not fighting.  The depressed addict will be double stigmatized.

Biological determinism is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific fact.  Concepts are presented and tested as scientific theorems.  The testing of the theorem is the scientific process; the conclusions are the scientific facts.  Needs and desires outside of science prompt the creation of the theorem; Edison wanted to provide light without the use of fire.  What needs and desires prompt this theorem, and why is it being prematurely sold as fact?  One reason is to reinforce the moral condemnation that biological determinism supposedly squelches.  Just as the Puritans could watch for who tripped on the church steps in order to determine who was most loved by God, moderns can determine with satisfaction that they are not-addicts.

There is no scientific dividing line between the addict and the not-addict as they are observed.  Addict to not-addict, like most things in nature, run on a continuum.  Efforts at line drawing are moral statements.  Therefore, the line between addict and not-addict is not an argument about what is, but an argument about what should be.  As scientific terminology, it has no meaning.

To set up the line-drawing fundamental to the biological determinist case, the author draws on the field of neuroscience.  "Neurological scientists don't talk about 'will-power,' which is a philosophical concept..." but rather "three kinds of self-control".  Note the line-drawing the author finds in neuroscience (emphasis mine):

• Addicts always take the immediate reward.
• Addicts typically act without processing all the available information.
• ...addicts were much less able to ["consciously stop a behavior that has become automatic"]

These three points are meant to make the biological determinist's case.  An "always" statement is always suspect.  In this case the article itself provides the exception.  From earlier in the article:

It has been years since the pleasure of drinking outweighed the pain it caused Fuller.  Looked a that way, the "social" and "spiritual" aspects of her problem seem insignificant compared with the contribution of biology.  If you weigh advances in neuroscience over the last few decades against social and spiritual progress, it's clear which field is more likely to produce the next break-through in treatments.

The paragraph is meant to support the argument that the biological determinism of addiction is so extreme that it will cause the addict to behave irrationally, against their own interests by every definition including the interest of taking an immediate reward.  Addiction, in other words, can shift fundamental laws of psychology that are not even shifted by severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or suicidal depression.

Addicts "typically"- and yet this information Interlandi gleaned from Thomas McLellan, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, elsewhere in the article:

Addicts are by no means unique in their propensity to relapse.  In a study comparing alcoholics and drug addicts to patients with diabetes, asthma and hypertension, McLellan found nearly identical rates of noncompliance and relapse; between 30 and 40 percent of each group failed to follow even half their doctors' guidelines.

"Much less able" refers to a test with a clicker and a computer screen.  I'm inclined to respond that if you put a clicker and a computer screen in front of me and used it to measure my will power, at least my hands would be full and I couldn't eat.  Meanwhile, if you have a scientific definition for "typically" or "much less able," let me know.

Another reason to promote the hypothesis of biological determinism is to increase money and power.  The scientist out to make a name for herself in her field; the pharmaceutical executives out to make a profit; the government agency out to create a constituency and a block of support.  The support is required from the non-addict and the addict alike.  To get support from the non-addict, aside from appealing to his elevated standing, one can also appeal to his fear that drugs really do alter the laws of psychology.  This magical view of drug use, countered in the book The Cult of Pharmacology and discussed in an earlier Cactus Juice entry, is trotted out for the article.

The appeal to the addict is simple:  this problem, this enormous problem that you have been cursed with, can be solved with no input from you.  And it can be solved with a pill.  Addicts are resistant to that message for a variety of reasons.  One is that after being offered opium and cocaine as treatments for addictions to substance such as alcohol addicts know that drugs get pushed on them premature to science.  Heroin addicts are simply switched to methadone, a synthetic heroin available through the legal drug market.  The author acknowledges all of that, but also describes a heroin-turned-methadone addict as being "in recovery for 20 years."  The addict states "some people feel recovery from addiction should not be easy or convenient."  I don't know about that, but I do know it should involve recovery.  Most addicts know that their addiction isn't a separate part of them but, for better or worse, integral to their place in the world and their experience of it.

Despite the appeal of the biological model, the director of the pharmacotherapies division of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Frank Vocci, is quoted expressing caution:

The idea that we can restore "self-control" or "free will" with medication is a very, very exciting one.  It could be paradigm shifting.  But we need more studies to see how consistently that impacts recovery.

The author continues on about biology: discussing the difficulties in shifting the biochemistry of the brain.  But that isn't what Vocci's quote is about; the question is how does shifting biochemistry impact recovery.  It is possible that biological determinism is false; that even with perfect brain chemistry the psychosocial elements of addiction will prevail.

Injection drug studies and an actual real word event (where what amounted to placebo heroine was released onto American streets) have shown that addiction to injection drug use can be shifted to addiction to the injection ritual itself (with more innocuous drugs such as caffeine or without any drug at all).  Chemistry isn't everything.

Following Ms. Interlandi's article, is a one-page rebuttal by Mitchell S. Rosenthal, M.D., writing in opposition to biological determinism.  His statement includes the following line, which I read with an amusement that was probably unintended:

...we should recognize that drugs alone are not the answer to addiction.

His conclusion is that treatment "can be empowering" and "...it is hope, grounded in self-awareness, that is the best safeguard for recovery we now have."

There is no line between the addict and the not-addict.  The motivations that put science in the place of ethics must be recognized, and cheap efforts to simplify both science and ethics must be avoided.

Reading the Economist, Finding Frank

I picked up The Economist in the airport this afternoon because there was an article about Jeremiah Wright, subject of Sunday's Cactus Juice.  The article was of no particular interest; how to deal with your spiritual adviser is not the purview of The Economist and the text cleverly diverts into the more familiar territory of Hillary's tax return by the end of the article.  This issue also covers:

• the McCartney divorce (marriage and the reckless pursuit of money)
• politics (of course)
• global warming (it all comes down to money)
• historical pronouncement (in the form of an obituary that strained that approved Economist vocabulary)
• race relations (more about money)
• race relations and politics (that was Wright)
• psychology of religion (under the heading of "Science and Technology"
• and historical pronouncement on another tack (John Adams and the HBO series)

The final was my favorite.  Economist.com occasional names "US and Britain" as one of the divisions of the globe.  A pack of writers that were more correct than the King and fomented revolt ultimately to create institutional stability is something The Economist can really sink its teeth into.

In the review of the psychology of religion,  The Economist comments that religion "consumes huge amounts of resources."  Psychology of religion, it turns out, could be reviewed using various theories of Darwin or the Darwinian type.  And those are economic arguments.

I say The Economist because I noted that there are no bylines.  In fact, one writer charmingly refers to him (or possibly her)self in the text as "your correspondent."  Near the end of the issue is a review of Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West.  The Economist comments of the author, "He is so frank about his prejudices as to be almost endearing."  I haven't read that book, so for today The Economist has charmed me the more.

I've been doing a very careful reading of a Newsweek article from the first week of March.  Not charmed.  The institutions of journalism are meant to give us something, something that blogs and democratization of journalism can't match. The Economist is well respected for a reason.  Every article has the stamp of the institution.  They don't publish the best a stringer could manage that week; they publish their best.