Cactus Juice

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.

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 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.

Managing Encounter with Spiritual Genius: creating religious experience

I've just begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the second time in my life.  Now that I have a few years of experience as an adult, it has been a goal to re-read a few books first encountered in my teens and early twenties.  This book was not selected for that project: I cannot compare the two experiences of reading it because on the first exposure the book held no meaning for me.  I picked it up now because I'm feeling a great deal of clarity about philosophy and, after some various religious experiences of my own, not so much clarity about my relations with spirituality and religion.  This time it is proving much more engaging.  And timely:

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.  I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammadan.  His religious has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.  It would profit us little study this second-hand religious life.  We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settings to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.  These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.  But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line... They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.  Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. (pp. 8 - 9)

James then goes on to give as an example George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion and very odd duck.  Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been canonized in American culture and will be of special note next week on the fortieth anniversary of his murder, and Malcolm X, ignored with diligence in the same culture, are examples that I spent more time pondering in my early college days.  Today the focus is on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether his rhetorical fervor has tainted the politician Barack Obama.

Genius of all kind has always been suspect because of its destabilizing aspect.  The canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr. is troubling where the intent seems to be to tame his message into bland tradition.  We know that this was President Lyndon Johnson's outright goal.  Canonization is a more civilized means than whipping to turn King into a trophy in the sitting room,with the bonus that he's no longer around to open his mouth and get himself sent back outside. Christ, Mohammad and most anyone else that really matters have suffered the same civilizing indignity.

On the King holiday, when I will sometimes make it my civic duty to suggest reading Malcolm X instead, the response can be ferocious and insane- occasionally someone will suggest it is racist.  Appearing to speak against Dr. King or elevating any other leader near him is Bad.  Mentioning King's personal failings can be met with the same ferocity, although they are discussed evenhandedly in the landmark Parting the Waters, a three-book series discussing all aspects of King's life and influence and which is intellectual bedrock for the King canonization. (Malcolm X has many biographies, but no similar book of such substance and therefore I simply suggest reading his Autobiography.)

Is there such a thing as spiritual genius?  Can spiritual leaders impart a special kind of wisdom, despite their inability to live balanced, measured, lives?  In most of the world, the answer to the first question is seen as "yes."  Europeans of the modern era, with their post-totalitarian wariness of all extreme ideas, are the only culture that leans toward a "no."  When America is labeled backwards in relation to Europe, the issue almost always comes down to America's continued willingness to grapple with contrasts in ethical extremes.  In less-developed nations it isn't about willingness; the factors of limited means make it an absolute requirement.  The European slant sidesteps ethical decisions by declaring an underlying balance and unity of ethics which is still stuck on a form of the idealism that feeds totalitarianism.

America at large, long freed from philosophical idealism, nonetheless turns ideas into cartoons ("tradition", as referenced by James above).  Literally: the canonization of King means that all good school children learn all good things about him, including in their cartoon books.  The cartoon is that King was Good (and Malcolm was Bad).  Somewhere, there is probably a cartoon that he went potty when his Mommy told him to.  No one wants their children to imitate King literally: tilting at windmills in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, selected specifically because he was young and didn't know any better, copying someone else's homework.  We Americans tend to sidestep the question of how wisdom comes from the unbalanced, attempting to isolate out wisdom while burying the questions of ethical difference and ethical failure.  This leads to the absurdities of snake-oil televangelists and their followings.  If you saw a flash of genius, the next step is to bury your head in the sand about the snake-oil.  Sometimes it means you end a racist institution.  Sometimes it means you pay for someone else's castle and vat of mascara.

My own thinking has been to view spiritual leadership with suspicion.  Prior to my encounter with James' argument that the role is different from the role of citizen or philosopher, or politician, I considered the role dangerous to the individual.  The way I saw it a good person (a good citizen, a sound philosopher, given to being a good theologian) sometimes found himself called to spiritual leadership.  Accepting the call did bad things to people; it made them bad citizens.  A person who took the role outside of an established religious institutional structure was in even more grave danger.  James suggests that the person will find themself in the role because they are already unbalanced.  My error was one of philosophical idealism- that all existential roles are fundamentally the same.

Given these common errors, Obama's speech on race was not just sane, but remarkably sane.  He starts by asserting the argument for political genius, as bland as that may be: unity, unity, unity.  The politician has a different job, and ethical challenge is not it.  Think of Roosevelt's fireside chats.  Balance.  Stability.  Obama, as a civilian in the world of spiritual genius and as a politician, is required to divide Wright's statements into good/bad and this he does.  Here he fails somewhat- he isn't clear about the existential divide between his own locus of judgment and that of Wright, but this is a political speech and not a philosophical treatise.

His sanity is that he refuse to label Wright as Good or Bad.  Wright is familiar to him, and in that familiarity Obama has been spiritually inspired.  But he also places Wright's excesses at a distance.  He judges, not as the European disdainer of religious genius judges and not as the American snake-oil viewer judges, but with honest judgment rooted in the reality of his experience.

Without intending to, Obama's speech draws focus on the absurdity of the spiritual leader gone politician.  These are two separate roles.  Obama speaks of Wright's sermon in terms of "mistake" and it would be mistake- if he were a politician.  But in terms of evangelism and a call to repentance in the tradition of the Old Testament and the words of John the Baptist in the New, Wright was spot on.  This is what Obama said:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.  It's that he spoke as if our society were static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.  But what we know-- what we have seen-- is that America can change.  That is true genius of this nation [sic].  What we have already achieved gives us hope-- the audacity to hope-- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama is a politician.  Repentance is not his game; the future is.  Wright is part of the meaningful discourse that has influenced Obama, but Obama must make different judgments.

Back to the question of whether these odd ducks can impart any wisdom.  I think the answer is: not directly.  We make a mistake when we expect them directly feed wisdom into our minds and our hearts.  Across America this morning, legions of Christians have walked into their churches, notebooks at the ready, expecting to get direct advice on how to live.  Run-of-the-mill preachers, imparting tradition and providing solid leadership, are going to step up to the pulpit and give it.  That is a valuable continuation of social norms and stability, but it is not spiritual genius.

Spiritual geniuses do not impart wisdom by direction, but rather by inspiration.  Where they provide direction, they create tradition.  Fox with his Quakers, Wesley with his Methodists, Smith with his Mormons.  These men purposefully created institutions, but institutions pass on tradition rather than genius.  Spiritual genius is not passed on, but rather interacted with.  At best, the institutions create a environment where the spark of genius may survive from generation to generation.  Obama is not meant to model his forward-facing politics on his Rev. Wright, but rather have it informed by Wright's calls to repentance.

Human growth requires an input from outside the models that we have already nurtured and established.  I already have an idea what my ethics are and what my ideals are for most humane lifestyle.  Continuing to interact only with what I see as balanced approaches to ethics and lifestyle isn't going to change anything.  As James wrote, "It will profit us little..."  I may not go in for the instability, I certainly don't want the crowd-at-large to turn to instability (really the number one reason some would like to duct-tape Wright's mouth shut- "It isn't that I'm too stupid to be allowed to hear him, but you might be."), but institutions are going to teach us nothing.

When Obama portrays Wright as the sometimes embarrassing uncle, I think he has made the correct judgment about how you or I should interact with the spiritual genius that we encounter.  Close, but not too close.  In the interaction with instability I will shift my stability.  James would say that I continue to create my own individual interaction with divinity, an interaction which must be made and not copied.

P.S.

Where the topic is prejudice and complexity, I always have to bring up The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.  My opinion is that this book should be required-reading for every high school student.  I just learned today that both King and Malcolm X were also fans of the book.

Barry Saunders, a Raleigh News & Observer columnist who frequently comments on race and what I shall call (with absurd formality given the context of his columns) "the Black experience," had an excellent column on the flap over Wright.

To see how intellectually vacant, morally flat-footed, and in some cases utterly failing in courage the cartoon response to this question is, you can unfortunately do no worse than today's Sunday Forum (a kind of expanded letters-to-the-editor) "What to make of Obama and his pastor" in the Raleigh News & Observer.

Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story

While wandering Barnes & Noble to pick up Notes from Underground (previously discussed on this blog), I picked up a copy of Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish.  The book was written with much support from the fiction awards, prizes & fellowships structure.  But what caught my attention is that the book is meant to be about a belief in happiness.

One of the other things the novel must face is a belief in the novel itself.  In the new millennium, how do you are write something meaningful when the culture is skeptical whether there is anything meaningful to be written?  Or, as Kadish has her character think about falling in love:

How are you supposed to conduct yourself when you believe you've had some kind of soul connection with a stranger, but-- being a modern rather than a character in a nineteenth-century play-- you are still have to suffer the petty indignities of dating?  Indignities about which you are, as a habit, skeptical? (p. 59)

The reader has picked up this awarded & fellowshipped author rather than a simple romance novel because, actually, really, you don't believe the romance formula.  And yet for the formula to work, you secretly do have to believe in it.  The disappointment of the girl-loses-guy turn cannot be completely expected; you had indeed been hoping for something else.  It is impossible that this attempt at love wasn't good enough.

Love is real... And it is impossible in this world. (p. 253)

Such is the thought that crosses the heroine's mind.  I'll leave it to the reader reaching the end of the book to find out if she was right or not.  (Meanwhile, for more on the romance novel formula, I suggest this essay from the Raleigh News & Observer by the author of the blog Breakfast with Pandora.)

The heroine is a literature professor, and along with the romance-formula for the man in her life, she and a student she labels "the canary in the coal mine" also follow the same ups-and-downs in their love for literature.  The emotional turmoil and perils-to-career being more hazardous for the canary, of course.  Some wisdom about the hazards of love comes early in the novel:

...don't pursue love against the interest of your own health, like an addict in need of a fix. (p. 12)

Advice about love, of various quality and from various sources, weaves through the rest of the novel.  The heroine is attentive, shocked, dismayed, uncertain.  Developing certainty for herself is of course part of the chick lit formula, and in this book it weaves through both love stories.  Developing certainty in the ability to obtain happiness, and how to do it, was of course advertised as the main theme of the book and culminates in a good essay on courage.  (For more on courage, I highly recommend Courage: A Philosophical Investigation by Douglas N. Walton, which is no longer in print and will have to be found at your local university library.)

Being a woman of my era, I expect the heroine to find happiness in her certainty.  Chick lit is about kicking romantic concessions to the curb.  Being a woman of philosophy, I expect happiness to be detached from the happenstance of events and made to stand on its own.  I don't know what is required to write The Novel That Matters, but I know one thing is that it must be true.  This novel is not true; it a takes a fairy godmother to wrap it up in a bow.  The bow, alas, says, "turn of this century chick lit," not "Truth."  It almost seems as if that is all the novel could possibly be: very good.

And it is very good.  Nearly every paragraph, page after page of them, present a fresh and creative idea or view of the world.  Even her sex scenes are fresh, without delving into originality of the prurient sort.  I myself have doubts about the continued Progress Of The Novel, where Thomas Pynchon-level (mentioned in the book) strangeness seems to be required to do anything original.  The high level of quality of this book, which none the less doesn't quite get there, makes me feel even more dark about that particular subject.

Meanwhile, the subject of Anna Karenina must be addressed.  The title Tolstoy Lied of course refers to the opening lines of Anna Karenina:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I have to admit it has been more than 10 years since I read the book.  (The novel, by the way, assumes that you have read the book, just like it guesses you may have read Pynchon, but you won't miss anything if you haven't.)  I did make reference to it in the letter I wrote to my church releasing my ex-husband from certain religious obligations to me.  As I remember it, Anna Karenina is not an indictment of hope, but an indictment of cruelty.  In my letter, I was making a commitment to avoid being cruel.

Each character in Anna Karenina is free to find happiness in the circumstances of his and her life; there is the Truth in the book.  Happiness, in that novel and in life, isn't about a fairy grandmother giving you what you want; it is the one thing a person can create their own certainty about in a world where nothing else is certain, indeed, where everything else seems to be anarchy.  It is perhaps the brilliance of that novel that it can illustrate this fact without actually showing it.

After all of that, my advice is this: read Tolstoy Lied on the plane.  This fellowshipped and awarded woman is a lovely writer and deserves for you to buy her book.  Read Anna Karenina with the tea and the cat: you deserve to read about an unhappiness that is real, and see the reality of happiness that lurks in those shadows.

*PS: Thinking over this novel keeps turning my mind to the lyrics of the Garbage song, "Sex Is Not the Enemy." Youtube here.  It's a tangent, but at several different angles.

And here a link to a blog post and many more links about Tolstoy Lied.  The amazon link at the beginning of the post contains a very good review from Publishers Weekly.

Notes from Underground

Just as the agnostic must commit to doubting even the possibility of doubt, the existentialist must commit to independent judgment which is independent even of reason.  Notes from Underground* by Fyodor Dostoevsky begins by skewering the idealistic philosophies- utilitarianism, transcendentalism, and all their friends.  Think Sartre meets South Park, with a touch of Bridget Jones-style self-consciousness.  Mainly it is a philosophical diatribe- certain and uncertain at the same time.

The novel then turns from philosophy to straight-up story telling.  The question is whether the hero is capable of love- both brotherly love and romantic love.  If he is not, is the impediment his existential uncertainty or his existential certainty?

The first half of the book smacked me up one side of the face and the second half smacked down the other.

In the first half, I understood some of my hold-outs to rationality overpowering freedom.  Sartre always said something along the lines that his atheism was a life-long project, by which he meant that he had to keep rooting superstitiousness out of every corner of his thinking.  Rationality has become the superstition of our scientific era, even more so than it was in the days of utilitarianism, etc. that Dostoevsky was living in.  Just to write that is difficult for me because even though I know it is true in the broadest sense, the precious little bits that I cling to are just too precious to me.

I could not even begin to do justice to the second half in my response- it is art, truly.  Both rationality and tightly-wound existentialism are shown as impossible co-minglers with that ecstatic communion that is the experience of love.  It is a harsh slap indeed, as those are the primary philosophies of our current American landscape, so overwhelming that it is seems nearly impossible to rise above them.  I should have already known that love is nearly impossible, but I see more clearly now why.

That is not a hopeful way to end this post, and the book is not a hopeful book.  The first paragraph of the book is the most hopeful about the possibility of escape from what, if I should call it "philosophical idealism" could even include idealized existentialism:

I am a sick man... I am a wicked man.  An unattractive man.  I think my liver hurts.  However, I don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me.  I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine and doctors.  What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine.  (I'm sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.)  No sir, I refuse to be treated out of wickedness....

As the rest of the book more directly addresses the philosophical obsessions of the 1860s, this broader paragraph is the most useful in addressing the obsessions of today.  Our remedies are of course the usual social remedies of the bourgeoisie lifestyle.  Before we recommend philosophical or moral education, as a culture we recommend lifestyle remediation- educate yourself to this job, live this way in this neighborhood, and you will achieve the ideal life.

But we also have the medicalized remedies as discussed in an earlier post.  Dostoevsky was using medicine as a symbol for what counted as the philosophical and moral education of his time.  Now, we directly mean medicine: take this pill.  Stories abound of people being criticized for experiencing life- if someone dies, if a love affair ends, there should be no sadness; take a pill!  The moral aspect of it is that you are in the wrong if you refuse the medicalization of your feelings.

It is impossible to know how much culture and how much inborn superstition can be put aside in order to have a direct experience of life, and in order to have the possibility of the experience of love.  I know that I experience life and that I experience a good life, including experiences of deep communion with certain persons amongst my fellow men and women.  Based on my belief in my own experience thus far, I have to say that the possibility is there, that it is worth making some struggle, that freedom is real enough that it can be a part of my life, even if it is not all of my life.  Dostoevsky perhaps saw a freedom as a simple binary issue (one is either free or one is not) and considered any shortcoming to be total failure; I do not.

*I'm no expert in translation, but the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation that I linked to is the one that I read and from my slight understanding of this issues associated with this book I would recommend it.

The War for Drugs, Addiction, and The Fight For Meaning

The War for Drugs

After reading The Cult of Pharmacology by Richard DeGrandpre, I'm reminded of an issue with gun manufacturers brought up in Michael Moore's movie Bowling for Columbine.  The fact is that most crime guns can be traced to a small number of retailers.  What if the FBI were to provide this information to gun manufacturers, and they could refuse to sell their product to these retailers?  If it were to reduce gun crime and improve public perception of guns, it would ultimately be in the manufacturer's interest to do so.  But gun manufacturers don't want to touch this, partly because they want to keep their industry totally separate from what people choose to do with their product.

Psychoactive drugs are not so different.  The synthesized drugs of the modern world, starting with cocaine, are not created and introduced to the public by the criminal gangs that now manage some of the biggest cash cows (like cocaine).  Rather, while pharmaceutical companies are trying to beat the patent cycle to get their investment out of new compounds before they go to generic, another kind of "natural" sociological patent cycle is happening with the criminal world.  Psychoactive drugs are introduced and popularized in the scientific, medicalized world, and then if they are profitable enough they go "generic" to the criminal world.

The end result of this is a real war, with real bullets, and real shattered communities, families and individuals.  We gasp at the absurdities of the sugar wars of centuries past, and are incensed by whatever economic motives, real or surmised, motivates more recent battles.  But in the economic war for drugs, "bad" people die to preserve the prosperity of pharmaceutical companies as they develop products for the "good" people.  It is a battle between good and evil for angel and demon compounds (p. 139) where the AMA is the Vatican, the FDA is the Office of the Inquisition, and the DIA, CIA, etc. are the executioners.

Illegal or legal, America is the most lucrative market for drugs in the world.  A rising tide lifts all boats, and Americans truly believe that drugs work- that certain chemicals will not only bring us back into balance or resist illness, but actually cause health, cause us to be "better than well."  We believe it so strongly that the illegal use of drugs is much higher now than it was prior to the era of concern over drugs (p. 128).  Additionally, the illegal drug trade directly feeds an industry built around treating addiction.  Concepts of dependence and addiction, mythologies of the magical essence of drugs that can take over the soul, feed both the drug addiction and the "need" for drugs and a medicalized process to escape the addiction.  The same concept of addiction that sells more cigarettes also sells more stop-smoking products.  The war against drugs is a mislabeling; the war is for drugs and for which kinds of drugs will be used. Your therapist is no more likely that your crack dealer to support you in leaving the church of pharmacology.

How The War Was Won

While The Cult of Pharmacology elegantly lays out the meaning of drugs and how the battle lines were created, Generation Rx by Greg Crister recounts the history of one particular battle- selling a patriotism to pharmacology, that is, getting the public to stand behind the "right" side of the line with vigor.  On it's own it presents a fascinating history that carefully weaves in the subtle intellectual shifts that arrived at the present day.  However it also engages in lame sniveling attacks at pharma that pander to a public that wants to blame someone else for the distressing reality that drugs aren't angels or demons- they are merely chemicals, which many different effects on the mind and the body.

According to Crister, the turning point in modern Direct to Consumer (rather than filtered through doctors) marketing came in response to a book by Ivan Illich called Medical Nemesis.  Illich was a philosopher who had written several other books about systems of modernity and he wrote sharply about the reductionism of modern medicine:

Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioral abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering.  Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations.  His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise.  His condition is interpreted according to a set of abstract rules in a language he cannot understand...  Language is taken over by the doctors: the sick person is deprived of meaningful words for his anguish, which is thus further increased by linguistic mystification.  (quote secondary from p. 41 of Generation Rx)

Illich was criticizing the message of the mass of the Cult of Pharmacology.  Joe David, a high-flying advertising executive specializing in drug ads read it and saw a criticism of the mass being in Latin.  According to Crister, this was the turning point which, after creative advertising and a few law suits, lead to the current Direct to Consumer age.

It is hard to argue against the idea that disease and drug information should be provided to consumers in plain English.  The author tries to present sound arguments about why consumers should be protected from focused advertising, but most arguments are easily countered by the protection the consumer has in their ever increasing education.  At one point he even criticizes the idea of creating one-a-day or combo drugs simply because they are more convenient. (pp. 124 - 125)  But I've used one of medications he attacks and it is easier to use one product once a day than two different products twice a day (four uses per day). Eventually he ends up sounding nearly incensed (pp. 159 - 162) that consumers might be making their own drug choices.

Central to his argument is his buy-in that drugs are either angels or demons (although in his world they are all demons, "poisons").  Any safety issue could label the product a "harmful drug". (p. 191).  But drugs are simply chemicals that have many effects on the body.  (In his book, DeGrandpre comments on the strange fact that, when it comes to drugs, you find yourself repeating the obvious.)  Users, and their advisors (doctors), select whether or what drug to use based on what risk they are willing to tolerate for relief from what symptom.  That's medicine.  The FDA regulates how much certainty we want to have in our knowledge of drug effects, and at what cost.  Making that determination is politics.  Absolutely nothing in the universe will make a drug equal health, no amount of kind spiritedness on the part of pharmaceutical stock-holders, no amount of regulation, nothing.  A drug is just a chemical.

Dependence and Addiction in Context

Where The Cult of Pharmacology really shines is in discussion of exactly what drug dependence and addiction means.  The author discusses a seven-level scale of drug use (abstinence, experimental, circumstantial, casual, regular, dependence, addiction) (pp. 94-95) and the complexities of drug effects on the body.  He discusses the "placebo text", that is, the myth that tells an individual what will happen to their body when they consume a particular drug. (p. 120)  The voluminous information about placebos is clear enough evidence the use of a drug is about much more than interactions of chemical. DeGrandpre presents a host of animal, human, and sociological studies that show drug effects to be infinitely more complicated than just the issue of chemical placebo hints at.  The following is perhaps the heart of the book:

In fact, at the center of the new scientific wisdom remains a firm belief in the magicalism of millennia past.  As a drug ideology derived from the eternal notion that psychoactive compounds contain a unique spirit or essence, the cult of pharmacology legitimized the belief that these spirits bypass all social conditioning of the mind and by themselves transform human thought and action.  Unlike other worldly modes of influence on mind and human experience, and despite many real advances in the pharmacological sciences in the twentieth century, psychoactive substances continued to be treated in the main as spirits that could enter into the body and take possession of it.  Yes, soul was translated into mind, and spirit was translated into biochemistry, giving the appearance that science and medicine had done away with the myths surrounding what had come to be understood as "drugs."  Drugs were not demythologized, however, by rather remythologized.  Psychobabble and biobabble replaced magical explanations of drug action, creating what had become by the end of the century a new, molecular pharmacologicalism.  These modes of explanation were then used to forge a modern pseudoscience of good and bad drugs, enforced via a differential prohibition of angels (Like Ritalin) and demons (like cocaine).  The "rational" science of drugs, in other words, carried myth along with it; it was itself framed and motivated by myth--a myth of angels and demons.(pp. 104 - 105)

Our belief in drugs is truly magical.  Consider this: patients who are given a placebo and told that it is a placebo nonetheless frequently get better. (p. 60)  We kill people at home and abroad over cocaine ("No doubt the war on drugs will one day rank amongst the most shameful periods in American history." -p. 174), but we give our children the virtually identical compound Ritalin. (p. 28)  The placebo text tells us that one in a dangerous drug used by degenerates, and the other helps our children cope with the modern knowledge economy.  The author notes:

Drugs contain potentialities that lie within the drug's chemical structure, pharmacologism posits, and when taken into the body, these potentialities take hold of and transform both brain and behavior.  This way of understanding drug outcomes has great efficiency, for it affords society with the opportunity to classify drugs once and for all as angels and demons, independent of time, person, or place.  Accordingly, the evil that some drugs pose is determined not by societal conditions or attitudes about these drugs--by experience--but by the drug's essence.  A century of angels falling from grace did not diminish the popularity of this theory, moreover, since the notion of pharmacological determinism was never judged to be in error; instead, each fallen angel was declared, one after another, to have been inadequately assessed pharmacologically.  (pp. 209-210)

I do think that the author goes a bit off in his argument against the negative effects of drug addiction.  For example, he suggests that smoking mostly only reaches the level of dependence, not addiction, where addiction is defined as "an activity so all-consuming that it disrupts the normal functioning of a person's life." (p. 95)  Risking a painful and early death cannot possibly be mere "dependence".  Risking severe life disruption because of possible criminal persecution, even if an artificially created outcome, cannot possibly be mere "dependence."  I see fellow food addicts trying to split this hair quite frequently.  They want to say that they aren't addicted to food because they haven't done anything irrational to get food, or pursued food in an irrational way.  True, but they are willing to endure the prison of obesity, and possible suffering and death as well, for the food.  That rational error is addiction.

On the other hand, the war on drugs model mirrors a puritanical world-view where life is a series of tests by God.  If you are not capable of passing the test, you are not welcome to participate in our society.  It is very plausibly argued that the drugs test is not administered on a level playing field.  And of course the law has in a certain sense caught up with this as the differential sentencing between powder and crack cocaine is being struck down.  But beyond that it is a matter of presenting people of different social experiences and enrichments with an alienated drug alternative, blessing those who take the alternative one way (sanctioned drugs) and striking with lightening those who take it another way (street drugs).  While it is not completely irrational for social ideals about drug use to be encoded into law, and especially not irrational for protections from irresponsible users (e.g. drunk drivers) to be legally encoded, there is a problem with the legal and scientific encoding of the irrational.

Personal Response to the Story of Addiction and the Demythologizing of the Angels

In discussion addiction as being about more than a simple chemical reaction, the author produces a description of opiate withdrawal that I can more than identify with as a food addict:

If and when the opiate user identifies opiate withdrawal as such, still another step must be taken for drug dependence to emerge.  Specifically, he or she must complete a ritual activity that is partly physiological, partly cognitive, and partly behavioral.  That is to say, the opiate user must experience withdrawal (a physical phenomenon), he or she must develop a concern over the withdrawal experience as such (a physical phenomenon), and then he or she must engage in drug use, take opiates repeatedly to eliminate or avoid opiate withdrawal (a behavioral phenomenon).  A breakdown in any part of this biopsychosocial circuit can prevent a pattern of dependent opiate use from emerging.  For example, an individual may experience little physical withdrawal following repeated opiate use, or, as found in Scharse's study of Mexican Americans, a person might interpret withdrawal as a sign of impending drug dependence and subsequently reduce or quit his or her drug habit.  If, on the other hand, a withdrawal experience causes an individual to become obsessed with the prospect and experience of withdrawal--and to continually use in order to avoid it--the circuit will be completed, with the learning process now occurring repeatedly, thus reinforcing the drug habit at all three levels: physiological, cognitive, and behavioral. (pp. 119-120)

The consequences of food withdrawal are the simple experience of hunger and the re-emergence of the stress of everyday life.  Hunger is not that dramatic, and the stress of life is not as overwhelming as it once was.  However, I am capable of ending up in a pattern of obsession over the boogie-man of hunger.  It takes a period of time where I can remove myself from everyday life and re-learn to experience and tolerate hunger before I can return to a normal pattern of eating, at which point it seems absurd that my fear of hunger could have ever been that extreme.

One study particularly caught my eye, which was the number of studies involving cocaine at different titrations vs. sucrose at different titrations (p. 200).  All of this is meant to demonstrate that cocaine is not chemically addictive, and no attention seems to be paid to another possible interpretation, which is that sucrose is as addictive as cocaine.

An additional point is that ritual itself is not the problem.  Every activity engaged in, every response to stimulus, has a psychosocial component.  The goal is to create psychosocial experiences which are present and whole.  Mal-adaptive drug (and food) rituals are the problem, where the experience is fragmented and alienated.  It doesn't even take a substance to encourage the maladaptive ritual.  Gambling addiction is commonly understood, and at different times and places street drugs become near placebos, such as the use of heroin nationwide in 1973 when a national storage drove the purity of street product as low as 0.5% (p. 203) meaning that this was no longer a maladaptive drug culture but a maladaptive injection ritual culture.

The author tries to make the point that making pharmacologism (as addiction) part of the study of pharmacology is like making sun worship part of  astronomy (and cites the book Ceremonial Chemistry by Thomas Szasz in making this argument). (p. 221)  But pharmacologism, the psychosocial relationship with the meaning of the drug, in inherent in the use of the drug.  The author further tries to argue that drugs are only a kind of a stimulus, "...the core myth underlying the cult of pharmacology is that drugs are unique from other, traditional modes of experience..." (p. 240)  Of course this is absurd; drug use will always be part of a wider story.  Really, every stimulus is.  Meaning can be imparted in a whole way:  I once knew a breast cancer survivor on tamoxophin who kept notes about the success of tamoxophin all around her environment.  Similarly, I've realized that my food withdrawal obsession focuses on certain symptoms.  Would it not be reasonable to use the most simple and safest compounds, such as bicarbonate to prevent stomach pain, to reduce my concern about those symptoms?  (I have to admit I find myself drawn to the scientific magic of ranitidine instead, and in fact in giving my food addiction a good smack down this weekend resorted to taking it rather than the bicarbonate that I had planned on.  It was an illogical "pharmacologism" decision.)

The other side of withdrawal obsession is craving obsession.  Interestingly, it seems that craving symptoms and actual drug use do not correlate. (p. 232)  That is definitely true in my experience with food- cravings are just information.  Sometimes they are information that the devil is knocking on the door and there is no way he should be invited in, literally, to supper.  Other times it means I should feed him right away so that he'll go away and let me get back to the rest of my life.

As a last note, it is an interesting slap in the face to the addiction industry that it doesn't own the pathway to ending addiction- there are many pathways, and an individual is as likely to use the tools of the industry (medications, therapy, etc.) as not.  (pp. 117-118, citation: Waldorf and Biernacki, The natural remission from opiate addiction: Some preliminary findings, Journal of Drug Issues II (1981): 61-74)   "Recovery," whatever that means, is an individual process with an individual definition of attainment.

Meta-pharmacologism: The Hope Before Drugs

Ultimately reading these books has reinforced for me the idea that we need existentialism now more than ever.  Critler, by no means writing a philosophical work, comes to the same conclusion which he couches in the term "notion of independence."  (p. 250)  He is talking from a behavioral and policy standpoint- as individuals, as patients, as doctors, as regulators, as a society, we each need to be approaching our decisions about drugs from a place of independence.  We are not the unwashed worshiping at the alter of pharmacologism; we each can determine the meaning and experience of a drug for ourselves, appropriate for the particular role we fill.

Pharmacologism as a psychosocial story or myth, and pharmacology as a science, have both created reductionist beliefs about what a human "is".  I view this reductionism as heretical.  Reductionist concepts of addiction are the opposite of certainty about another person's choices in that it is certainty about their lack of choice.  In this addiction concept, only other people can experience pure addiction.  You yourself cannot, because your experience of your own complexity does not allow it.  Where you have been convinced to ignore your own experience of your complexity and believe a reductionist theory of addiction, something evil has been done to you and it wasn't done by a chemical.

I am perhaps fortunate in that food does not lend itself to reductionist theories of addiction, though there are plenty hot on the efforts to shoehorn it into one.  I did at one time think that there was nothing I could change about my relationship with food, that it's "just how I am."  There are people who take set-point theories about body weight and try to sell them to the obese- how absurd is it to claim that my body wanted to be 300 lbs.?  But that is the sale that is underway.  In losing weight, I've proven more than that I can manage addiction, or that I have it in me to do things that I'm proud of doing.  I've proven that as a human being, I can set the meaning of my own life.  Meaning comes before direction and action, before chemicals and other things of the physical world, and is perhaps the most important thing that a human being creates.

P.S.

Another interesting looking book about the shaping of drug and medical information and meaning: Selling Sickness

Also by Greg Critser: Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World

Also by Richard DeGrandpre: Ritalin Nation: Rapid-Fire Culture and the Transformation of Human Consciousness

Spark of Life

In the newspaper I read about the Edge Question, a call for essays in response to the following prompt: "When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.  When God changes your mind, that's faith.  When facts change your mind, that's science.  What have you changed your mind about?  Why?  You can read the essays here, and they are worth reading.

One of the essays selected was by Tor Norretranders, blogger (primarily in Danish, but he kindly has a category for his English language posts), and author of the sociological study The Generous Man: How Helping Others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do, discussing a concept he calls "permanent reincarnation."

The idea is that the thingness of a living being is different from, for example, the thingness of a chair.  A chair is a fairly consistent set of molecules in a fairly consistent shape; that is it's essential thingness.  A bit may chip off, it may break off a leg, eventually it make be broken so severely that it can no longer be called a chair.  But for the most part there is no debate over the existence of the thing.  The debate is over the meaningfulness of our communication about the thing- Do we all experience the thing in the same way?  What about thing gives it the definition of chair?

A living thing is different.  Every year, about 98% of the molecules that make up a respirating creature (such as a human being) are shed off into the universe and similar, but not the same, molecules are re-taken up out of the universe.  Not only are we mainly not the same thing from year to year, if we lived long enough we would be a universal thing- each of us would have been the entire universe.  On the flip side, if I don't live, the thing that will be my corpse is only an accident of timing.  If I had died in a different year, my corpse would be a completely different thing.  Given all of this, one can only stare at the consistency of a human consciousness in total awe.

On a related topic,  in The Conservative Soul Sullivan touched on the idea of cultural or philosophical consistency.  I don't have the book in front of me to cite the particular Chinese parable used, but the idea is this:  whatever is "right" about a person, or also one could use the world "virtuous," is contained in the existence of that person and dies with her.  Any words they may have left behind are mere bones- things like a chair more than a thing like the person that wrote them.  The words may be excellent for what they are, but they are only what they are.  Human virtue has to be reborn each generation; it does not exist in books.

Indeed, as Nooretranders pointed out in his essay, it barely clings to the human corporeal.  It was astonishing enough to think that the human spirit is built over the chemicals and biologies of the human body, but it is even more astonishing to think that in our very biology is the fact that the human spirit is beyond biology.

P.S.

Of interest in relation to my previous post on multilingualism, I noted that Tor Norretranders wrote a post encouraging multilingual blogging and discussing practical issues with the practice, which he himself employs.

The Conservative Soul

Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul is most excellent as the confrontation of fundamentalism that it was meant to be.  I myself am currently in a state of extreme rootlessness regarding my religious ideals and though I have rejected certain ideas of fundamentalism, others had vined their way into my thinking through the constant message that fundamentalism is religion, a message that is megaphoned out from those speaking both for and against it.

Actually, our current cultural climate not only megaphones that religion is fundamentalism, but that all morality is fundamentalism.  The choices presented by popular culture are either to accept your religion or your morality with fundamentalism, or to reject all of them together.  Because of the importance of teasing religion and morality both apart from fundamentalism, I recommend this book not only for someone hoping to understand the current political climate, but for anyone hoping to escape from errors of thought which have been inculcated into them by the fact of having been born in this time and place.  For me, the most extreme of those errors are brought to light in my food addiction, and indeed so many of the addicts thought patterns start at the all-or-nothing abyss (pp. 202 - 209) essential to fundamentalism.

Sullivan's definition and description of conservatism proper is also an excellent little refresher and primer.  He at first launches into a rather grand idea of conservatism:

This is where conservatism starts [a "definition of humanness that is marked by imperfection and uncertainty", as found in the same gospels called upon by Christian fundamentalists].  If we are all humans, then we each have a beginning and an end; and each of us has a different beginning and end.  We see the world from where we are, and our understanding of the universe is intrinsically rooted in a time and place.  We can do all we can to increase our knowledge and gain deeper and deeper insight.  We can read history and philosophy; we can travel; we can ask questions of young and old; we can debate; we can pray; we can grow through pain and amusement of daily life.  But we will never fully or completely transcend where we are.  And even if we could, such transcendence would render us unintelligible to those still earthbound. (p. 174)

While this is a beautifully written call to the conscience-based theological alternative to fundamentalism that Sullivan has explained in his book, it is more abstract that political conservatism requires.  However Sullivan is not only presenting a political conservatism, but also presenting a world-view to take on fundamentalism.  He then advances from this philosophy into something a little more solid, that in my thinking is the philosophical beginning to political conservatism:

...we live in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to morning or night. (p. 175)

This is direct contradiction to the Marxist idea of history as progress, and the subset of Christianity known as dispensationalism.  Conservatism expects nothing about truth to come out of history. (p. 211)  In fact, politics isn't about truth with a capital "T".  Sullivan writes:

As a politics, its [conservatism's] essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge.  It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism. (p. 230)

That which passes for national political dialog is actually about ideology in the broadest sense.  Sullivan refers to calling this politics a "battle of ideas" as vulgarity. (p. 199)   The opportunity to run for President is seen as an opportunity to leave statecraft behind and enter into the realm of pure philosophy.  No one currently running for President, with the exception of Hillary Clinton and her crass proposals for repackaging the economic successes of some into goods for others, are talking about statecraft.

As someone who has always been politically conservative, I find it odd to have to make the argument that politics is only about statecraft, and that politicians should stick to the business at hand.  Defining the meaning of the universe is not the job of my elected representatives; having my trash picked up on time is.  That seems painfully obvious.

With no one in the presidential race talking about statecraft, certainly none of them are talking about political conservatism.  In contrast, Sullivan returns several times to the great statement of Ronald Reagan, patron saint of conservatism, in his 1981 inaugural address:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.  From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people.  Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who amongst us has the capacity to govern someone else?

This is conservatism, and it is important that we know it.  I have already suggested that hope starts with care, responsibility, respect and knowledge; the same four items named by Fromm as requirements for love.  When things are called by the wrong name, knowledge is perverted.  When knowledge is off the rails, there is no basis for hope.  Whatever one may think of the view currently being offered by President Bush and his team that we must allow someone else to make value judgments between liberty and security on our behalf, how it plays out in history must be judged by what it is.

The alternative, the confusion of mislabeling and misnaming, means that conservatism will head into the same morass that American liberalism has been in for perhaps fifty years.  It is actually probably too late (and Sullivan explains the problems in thought and in on-the-ground political action that have already happened because fundamentalism has been mislabeled as conservatism).  It was Sullivan's article on Obama, discussed previously in this blog, that helped me finally understand how this happened to American liberalism, crushed by it's own mislabeled fundamentalism of ideology (rather than religion) as played out in the various catastrophes of the last century.

Perhaps Sullivan is right.  Perhaps Obama, the only likely escapee from fundamentalism, is the only one who, like Bill Clinton before him, in turning the conversation to statecraft can ultimately turn the conversation to political conservatism.  But that is hoping for a history with direction, and that just isn't conservative enough for me.

P.S.

Sullivan makes important reference to Michael Oakeshott.  An Introduction, at Amazon.com.  Wikipedia article.
Sullivan also discusses Montaigne at length.  Wikipedia.
And Hobbes.  Wikipedia again.

Podcast of an author interview.  (I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet myself.)

Follow-up reading on the book:

Glen Greenwald's review of Sullivan's book and the issues discussed.

The Washington Post review of Sullivan's book by Bryan Burrough claimed that if you've ever read anything by Ann Coulter, then this book is not for you.  Actually, I so thoroughly enjoy this part of the review that I've got to quote the entire thing:

The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy.  This is not a bad thing, just a warning.  If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you.

You got that America?  You must be stupid, stupid, stupid. <Loafingcactus here cackles and cackles with amusement.>

For good measure, David Brooks in his review also brings up Ann Coulter, this time as not more stupid than Sullivan and his readers but as more dangerous than the Christian fundamentalists Sullivan is writing about.  While both are worth reading (as is Ann Coulter), I find the need to keep bringing up Ann Coulter as a contrast... um, curious.  It is Ann Coulter who is a force of nature in defining reality according to her own centered consistency.  True, she cannot be reasoned with in any way, but the one quality she has is truly amazing.

The Brooks article I found compelling on first reading, although I was hungry at the time.  After a snack and a re-read, no.  It's criticisms of the book are hollow, wrong.  But in criticizing the book he does present an interesting alternative viewpoint.