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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City were delighted to welcome Michelangelo’ s sculpture of David for a two year “all American” exhibition.

After a two year visit to the United States, Michelangelo’ s David is returning to Italy…

His Proud Sponsors were:

Table of Contents Vol. 2 No. 4

Articles

Interview

Book reviews

Book excerpts

In Praise of a Rocky Transition
by Naomi Klein, The Nation, November 13, 2008

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.

In a moment of high panic in late September, the US Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed–a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that “Treasury had no authority to issue the notice.”

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country’s banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, “Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending–for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc.–is a violation of the act.” Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. “There is only one president at a time,” we hear from Barack Obama. That’s true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama’s ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama’s renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.

Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats, including Obama, to get the bailout passed. Now that it is clear that the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right but a grave responsibility to intervene forcefully.

I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. “None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression,” explained one unnamed Congressional aide.

More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for “change,” the mantra abruptly shifted to “smooth transition” and “continuity.”

Take Obama’s pick for chief of staff. Despite the Republican braying about his partisanship, Rahm Emanuel, the House Democrat who received the most donations from the financial sector, sends an unmistakably reassuring message to Wall Street. When asked on This Week With George Stephanopoulos whether Obama would be moving quickly to increase taxes on the wealthy, as promised, Emanuel pointedly did not answer the question.

This same market-coddling logic should, we are told, guide Obama’s selection of treasury secretary. Fox News’s Stuart Varney explained that Larry Summers, who held the post under Clinton, and former Fed chair Paul Volcker would both “give great confidence to the market.” We learned from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Summers is the man “the Street would like the most.”

Let’s be clear about why. “The Street” would cheer a Summers appointment for exactly the same reason the rest of us should fear it: because traders will assume that Summers, champion of financial deregulation under Clinton, will offer a transition from Henry Paulson so smooth we will barely know it happened. Someone like FDIC chair Sheila Bair, on the other hand, would spark fear on the Street–for all the right reasons.

One thing we know for certain is that the market will react violently to any signal that there is a new sheriff in town who will impose serious regulation, invest in people and cut off the free money for corporations. In short, the markets can be relied on to vote in precisely the opposite way that Americans have just voted. (A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans strongly favor “stricter regulations on financial institutions,” while just 21 percent support aid to financial companies.)

There is no way to reconcile the public’s vote for change with the market’s foot-stomping for more of the same. Any and all moves to change course will be met with short-term market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear that the new rules will be applied across the board and with fairness, the market will stabilize and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence has never been better. Over the past three months, we’ve been shocked so frequently that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that clearly predates him, or fault him for honoring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories fade.

When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favors a smooth transition. When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.

This article was first published in The Nation.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stanley Fish.

Stanley Fish made the campaign’s most audacious — also the most thoughtful — attribution of a certain aspect of divinity to Barack Obama. Fish was a Milton scholar before he became a culture warrior and, more recently, the New York Times’ “Think Again” blogger on the life of the mind, on campus and off. When Doctor Fish pictured the taunting John McCain and the imperturbable Barack Obama as a version of Satan’s contest with Jesus, he was drawing on Milton’s Paradise Regained — “a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e. maverick) loses it… The power Jesus generates,” in Fish’s reading “is the power of not moving from the still center of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him, leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale… Jesus is usually the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.”

Oh, before I forget:

“Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way), just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates.”

And the winner is…

Christopher Lydon interviews Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Slavoj Zizek (1:04:19 minutes, 29.5 mb mp3)

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? … Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.

Century of the Self – Adam Curtis

Documentary about the role of psychoanalysis, marketing, and public relations in the United States.

From the same director as “The Power of Nightmares”

This documentary describes the impact of Freud’s theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their “engineering of consent”.

Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the “father of the public relations industry”. Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, one of the main opponents of Freud’s theories.

Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people’s rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

In Episode 4 the main characters are Philip Gould and Matthew Freud, the great grandson of Sigmund, a PR consultant. They were part of the efforts during the nineties to bring the Democrats in the US and New Labour in the United Kingdom back into power. Adam Curtis explores the psychological methods they now massively introduced into politics. He also argues that the eventual outcome strongly resembles Edward Bernays vision for the “Democracity” during the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

To quote the BBC site:

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Source: Wikipedia

Via The End of Capitalism

A New Scientist Special Report, 16 October 2008

THE graphs climbing across these pages are a stark reminder of the crisis facing our planet. Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting Earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency.

But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.

This, of course, is economic heresy. Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe: it is, they claim, the only force capable of lifting the poor out of poverty, feeding the world’s growing population, meeting the costs of rising public spending and stimulating technological development – not to mention funding increasingly expensive lifestyles. They see no limits to that growth, ever.

In recent weeks it has become clear just how terrified governments are of anything that threatens growth, as they pour billions of public money into a failing financial system. Amid the confusion, any challenge to the growth dogma needs to be looked at very carefully. This one is built on a long-standing question: how do we square Earth’s finite resources with the fact that as the economy grows, the amount of natural resources needed to sustain that activity must grow too? It has taken all of human history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form it will take just two decades to double.

In this special issue, New Scientist brings together key thinkers from politics, economics and philosophy who profoundly disagree with the growth dogma but agree with the scientists monitoring our fragile biosphere. The father of ecological economics, Herman Daly, explains why our economy is blind to the environmental costs of growth (“The World Bank’s blind spot”), while Tim Jackson, adviser to the UK government on sustainable development, crunches numbers to show that technological fixes won’t compensate for the hair-raising speed at which the economy is expanding (“Why politicians dare not limit economic growth”).

Gus Speth, one-time environment adviser to President Jimmy Carter, explains why after four decades working at the highest levels of US policy-making he believes green values have no chance against today’s capitalism (“Champion for green growth”), followed by Susan George, a leading thinker of the political left, who argues that only a global government-led effort can shift the destructive course we are on (“We must think big to fight environmental disaster”).

For Andrew Simms, policy director of the London-based New Economics Foundation, it is crucial to demolish one of the main justifications for unbridled growth: that it can pull the poor out of poverty (“The poverty myth”). And the broadcaster and activist David Suzuki explains how he inspires business leaders and politicians to change their thinking (“Interview with an environmental activist”).

Just what a truly sustainable economy would look like is explored in “Life in a land without growth“, when New Scientist uses Daly’s blueprint to imagine life in a society that doesn’t use up resources faster than the world can replace them. Expect tough decisions on wealth, tax, jobs and birth rates. But as Daly says, shifting from growth to development doesn’t have to mean freezing in the dark under communist tyranny. Technological innovation would give us more and more from the resources we have, and as philosopher Kate Soper argues in “Nothing to fear from curbing growth“, curbing our addiction to work and profits would in many ways improve our lives.

It is a vision John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of classical economics, would have approved of. In his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, he predicted that once the work of economic growth was done, a “stationary” economy would emerge in which we could focus on human improvement: “There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress… for improving the art of living and much more likelihood of it being improved, when minds cease to be engrossed by the art of getting on.”

Today’s economists dismiss such ideas as naive and utopian, but with financial markets crashing, food prices spiralling, the world warming and peak oil approaching (or passed), they are becoming harder than ever to ignore.

Read more:

Why politicians dare not limit economic growth (FREE FEATURE)

Harvesting renewable energy will help us to avert climate change without big changes to our lifestyles, right? Not without cutting consumption, says Tim Jackson

Interview: The environmental activist

Why do we fail to live within the constraints that nature has set for us, and fool ourselves things have never been better, asks environmental activist David Suzuki

Economics blind spot is a disaster for the planet

If we can’t find a way to switch to a sustainable economy, we’re heading for the ultimate crash Herman Daly

Interview: Champion for green growth (FREE FEATURE)

Gus Speth has influenced US environmental policy from the Supreme Court to the White House. He tells Liz Else why green values stand no chance against market capitalism

The trickle-down myth: Does growth really help the poor?

The argument that economic growth helps fight poverty is disingenuous and misguided, says economist Andrew Simms

We must think big to fight environmental disaster

As the ecological and financial crises mount, Susan George says our only option is to scale up positive actions to transform our economies

What would life be like in a land without growth?

What would a sustainable society actually be like? How would we make a living? And what would happen to all those bankers? New Scientist imagines the progress of a “steady state” economy 10 years after its inception

Nothing to fear from curbing growth

Breaking our dependence on profits and growth would make our lives better, not worse, says philosopher Kate Soper

Plus:

Editorial: Time to banish the god of growth

Tips from scientists on how to save the planet

Twelve recommended books on overconsumption

The facts about overconsumption

Recommended organisations and websites: read more and take action

From issue 2678 of New Scientist magazine, 16 October 2008, page 40-41

Had enough? No? Then watch this.

From the Prologue of Bankrolling Evolution by David Loye

In 1971 I wrote a book called The Healing of a Nation. Based on 350 years of American history and the most compelling social science of the time, in the closing chapter I offered a Program for a President.

The book won a national award earlier given to Martin Luther King and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. But since then nothing like the Program on the scale I outlined there has been attempted.

Here, nearly 40 years later, I am going to try again. This time I believe this new Program for a President has a good chance of being put to use for four reasons.

Foremost is the best prospect in some time for the needed President and our best chance to put the power of progressive science and progressive spirituality behind a healing presidency.

In The Healing of a Nation can be found the haunting prediction I made of what we need at what is now rapidly becoming the most crucial juncture in the history of our species on this planet. Included here in the Notes, this long unfulfilled prediction points toward the inspiring newcomer Senator Barack Obama as having the rare combination of intelligence, eloquence, moral sensitivity, organizational ability, and feeling for the role of the leader as healer required for our time. Of correlated importance is the fact of the swelling of hope and a joyful new readiness to fight for the better future among a significant number of young people—as among their elders in what remains of intelligence in America.

There is this surge of recognition that underlying all attempts to blur the issue lies what’s actually riding on the outcome of the 2008 and 2012 elections in America. There is this great new deep and driving recognition of the battle of evolutionary intelligence versus evolutionary lunacy on which all quality of life on this planet depends.

A third reason is the good feeling I have about the new way this book provides to cut through the mess to the evolutionary core. Here, in a liberation of the potentially revolutionary power of a new science of healing, can be seen the cliff edge on which we teeter between progressive leadership policies and the disaster… of a continuation of the regressive Bush years in any way or form.

Fourth is that what I propose is designed not just to empower those “on top.” For no president, or congress, or any other leadership entity alone can possibly do what’s needed in face of the size of the task revealed by the Bush years.

In a way, which still astounds me, out of this book’s new grounding in history and the case it makes for a new science of healing has emerged a device designed to give the kind of power to the people that worldwide we dream of—power to encourage not only the kind of great leadership but also the greatness among a re-awakened people that Abraham Lincoln evoked in calling for the Americans of his time to “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

Outlined in the closing chapters of this book, further detailed in its companion, Measuring Evolution, is the story of the development and potentially transforming uses for a new measure of global health and happiness for more effective guidance of governmental, industrial, and personal and social policy and action.

In comparison with all the much larger and more familiar plans and programs being proposed to help us dig out of and head off further disaster, what I propose must inevitably seem far too new and small for any useful impact. But the Bush years’ profligate and power-mad mix of massive cut back for social needs and massive increase for social lunacy will force upon America the kind of scaling back in hopes and funding that—without new ways of doing more with less money—will further accelerate disaster.

In contrast to the need for new money that won’t be there, what I propose is a comparatively easy way of guaranteeing that the expenditure of money already being spent, or required by basic necessity, steadily advances rather than checks us in place or drives us backward.

This is the vital point.

What I propose doesn’t require the customary battle for passage through a corrupted congress and hordes of lobbyists dangling millions to block progressive action. Maximizing impact for minimal investment, it can be quickly and easily put to use by every one of us in a responsible leadership position in America or anywhere else in the world. It is based on the past 40 years of research into defining what’s best designed to advance human evolution—that is, not only biological and technological evolution, but psychological, social, cultural, economic, political, educational, moral and spiritual evolution…. It’s an expression of the kind of caring, hands-on approach that counselors of every kind—psychiatrists, psychologists, priests, ministers, wise tribal elders—have over centuries brought to the unbalanced individual or family. Both scientifically and spiritually grounded, it is a measure for reaching decisions that lead to national and global health rather than sickness….

To best understand what we face and must do we must take a new look at some widely forgotten or unknown American and world history. Interlinked is the need to catch up and smarten up in understanding science. We must at last grasp how science shapes us and our future. For the incredibly poor and distorted American and global understanding of what science is and does has not only led to where we are. The numbing and dumbing down of the American and global mind now seriously threatens the future for our species and our planet.

Whether we call it that or not, the healing of nations requires the development of the new field of the psychiatry and management science of evolution. We need a new psychiatry of evolution to diagnose the problem and prescribe the course for therapy. We need a new moral-oriented management science of evolution to guide the investment of the funds needed to make therapy work.

…we can no longer afford the pathology of leadership, of enablers and followers, of regressive money, and of consequences probed and laid bare to the eye in Part I. Nor can we any longer afford the survival of the fittest, selfish gene, winner take all, wholly amoral and immoral and thereby incompetent “management science” of men and women like those who during the Bush years poured into the U.S. government and Congress to loot the treasury for their friends.

The driving urgency for this book and proposal is the fact history shows us that once those upon whom blame is focused are out of office the rush comes to sweep bad memories under the national rug.

But should this be allowed both 5,000 years of our bloody past and 300 years of psychiatry tell us that the pathology within the American heart, mind, and soul the Bush years exploited will not only long haunt the world. Without the catharsis and the action-oriented political, economic, moral and spiritual healing outlined in this report, what seized us will rise again to close out the end game for evolution against us….

To those looking for more exotic answers the focus of this report on something as commonplace as money may be jarring and seem out of place. But atop our distressingly unsuccessful earlier investment in religion, we’ve seen millions, indeed billions and even trillions spent on science and education to find our global situation becoming worse rather than better….

The time has come we must face the question of sickness versus health not just on the level for a single American president or any other individual, or just in the family, the neighborhood, the city, or nation, but globally. To shape the development of a psychiatry and a management science of evolution, on the behalf of a world whose future we have endangered, four basic questions, which form the Parts and structure for this book, must be answered by Americans….

What’s wrong with us?…

Why and how did we get sick?…

What’s the prospect for getting better? What’s worked in the past?…

How do we keep this syndrome of the worst in us from coming back again—and by the evidence of this book and countless others, much worse next time?…

From a press release dated January 7, 2008

Based on chapter two, The Pathology of Enablers and Followers, in Bankrolling Evolution: A Scientific Guide to Global Recovery from the Disaster of the Bush Years, by David Loye.

Dr. Loye is the former Research Director for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA School of Medicine, and author of the award-winning The Healing of a Nation.

Bankrolling Evolution is a year end report to the Council of the Darwin Project (www.thedarwinproject.com) composed of over 50 leading American, European, and Asian scientists.

After WWII  an explosion of scientific studies revealed that globally even more important than the question of the pathology of leadership is the question of the pathology of enablers and followers-which remains with us long after leaders fall.

In Escape from Freedom in 1941, An American Dilemma in 1944, and The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, the remarkable psychosocial analyst Erich Fromm, the great Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, and the Frankfurt School/UC-Berkeley team headed by T.W. Adorno were among scores of social scientists who first warned of what came roaring out of the authoritarian past to seize America during the Bush years.

Revealed by these pioneers and their successors-whom, as a fledgling psychologist back then, I was fortunate to know and work with-was the regressive “vicious cycle” that Myrdal first wrote of.  Fleshed out by Fromm and the Adorno group, not just in studies of fascism in pre-World War II Germany but in even more unsettling studies of its  “normal” spread in post-World War II America, was this recurring pattern much to the point again today.

First comes a fierce, fearful, and backward-driving backlash against the progressive science and progressive goals and periods of significant earlier evolutionary advance.

Evolutionary advance, for example, such as the civil rights movement in America, the colonial independence movement elsewhere, the human rights movement that spawned the UN and all the other progressive movements that raised hope worldwide after World War II.

But alongside this progressive global rise in hope the Myrdal, Fromm, Adorno studies showed how there gathers the regressive counter-force that George Orwell in 1984, Sinclair Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and others foresaw and warned of.

Pointed like an arrow toward its culmination in the disaster of the Bush years is this backlash that over thirty years gathered force in America in the muttering and rumbling movement of nay-saying antis; which swells until it seethes with everything from fire-breathing televangelists to bombs to resist progressive education, progressive science, and what by all the psychiatric measures we know of constitutes sanity-e.g., the evolutionary advance of the women’s, environmental, and peace movements, and by now even how we are to survive in a world of global warming, escalating wars and hatreds, and nuclear overkill.

Out of the unheeded wave of scientific warning three works went straight to the core of the challenge to sanity and survival that faces the world today.

Most jarring were the experiments of Stanley Milgram, which divided American college student volunteers into “Teachers” and “Learners,” with the Teacher instructed to administer an electric shock whenever the Learner failed to provide a right answer to an ostensible test of memory.

The shock felt round the thinking world at the time of the experiment, 1961, was that under this situation of experimental “obedience to authority” a clear majority of Teachers-65 percent-would continue the shocks until, screaming with pain, the supposed Learner collapsed!

“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation,” Milgram wrote at the time.

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.“

Earlier, in 1953, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted the famous “conformity” experiments that were paired with Milgram’s to try to rouse the sleepwalkers during the rightist march to where we are today.

This time, supposedly in a test for accuracy of vision, again and again American college student volunteers, in each case customarily seven in number, were shown a series of cards. One card showed a simple line of a certain length.  The other card showed three lines of varying length. Set after set the seven volunteers were asked to report which line on the second card most nearly matched one of the three lines on the test card.

Unknown to the last man in line, previous to him everyone was secretly working with the experimenter.  And while the last man sat there in increasing bewilderment, one after another they gave a wrong answer.

Even though the right answer was beyond all questioning obvious, 32 percent or roughly one third of those tested in this situation went along with the group rather than go by the evidence of their own eyes and minds.

On the surface, this finding for an American readiness to knuckle under to group pressure, or conformity,  may not sound as impressive as Milgram’s results.  But as I  explored with Asch in an interview for Psychology Today back then, there was as much reason for horror here as with Milgram because of the way Asch’s findings also hauntingly foreshadowed what surfaced to be confirmed by polls and regressive “red state” versus progressive “blue state” voting patterns during the Bush years.

One universally ignored finding of the Adorno group alone gave us most of the answers needed for grounding a psychiatry of evolution and a new American revolution.  This was their in-depth detailing of the differences between the “authoritarian personality” and the “democratic personality.”

Dropped into the limbo of the past is how, in their post-WW II studies of hypothetically average Americans, they still found a substantial number for those who fit the profile for a “democratic personality.” But what horrified both the scientists and those who read of and understood the implications was the even greater number of Americans who fit the profile for the “authoritarian personality.”

As America was obviously not swamped from coast to coast with jack-booted Hitlerians, common sense told those who bothered to think about the matter that this was probably just more of the screwy statistics of do gooders and pointy heads.  But what the Adorno group research repeatedly hammered across was the message there were and are two kinds of people who, by nature, nurture, or otherwise, are infected with the “authoritarian personality.”

The problem is not just the leaders on whom we focus to get ourselves off the hook-the Hitlers, Stalins, or in “our time” Bush and the dark doppelganger of Vice President Cheney.  The other side to the “authoritarian personality” is the pathology of the followers who, whether jack-booted or merely voting the New Masters in and cheering them on, are ready to submit and unquestioningly do as they are told.

In other words, for the success of every authoritarian or dominator clique there have to be from one to many millions ready to blindly submit to domination   For the hammer there has to be a nail.  For the top there has to be a down.  For the predator there has to be prey.  For the con man there has to be the sucker.  Likewise, for the dominating authoritarian there have to be anywhere from one to many millions ready, as could be seen in Hitler’s Germany as well as in America Republican party conventions and obedient and conforming House and Senate Democrats in “our time,” joyfully and even ecstatically ready to submit and do as one is told.

Here is what, above all, we need to realize today.  The studies of the Adorno group, Asch, Milgram and scores of others were not studies of “weirdos,” the riff raff, or so-called lower orders.

These were studies of young men with nation-wide counterparts in America today.  Back in that time they were studies of the “boy next door.”  The family farm’s college bound “young ‘un.”  The “whipper-snapper” who could practically run the hardware store by himself.

They were studies of the young men who became the parents, teachers, coaches, ministers, favorite uncles, and voices and lords of the media, of the American husbands, bread-winners, neighbors, reporters, and voters of the Bush years.

They also became the politicians;  who were the fathers, mentors, and counselors of a majority of the occupants of Congress, of both parties, both House and Senate, and of the U.S. Supreme Court;. who in their role of enablers and followers, and in their failure in their sworn duty to the U.S. Constitutional requirement of impeachment, have become the astonishment of the Bush years.

What confronts the awakened American and our shell-shocked world is a challenge not merely to politics, economics, or any other battle that progressive money is again being forced to come up with millions to fight  regressive money’s customary billions.

What confronts us is the fact that, despite all the glitter of new technology and ever bigger super markets, a distressingly large segment of the American population is either still functionally barely advanced beyond the old days of kings with a poorly educated peasant population, or still wide open to rapid regression backward in time.

What confronts us are the ramifications of a sickness within which a particular president, cabal, and more generally a morally bankrupt political and economic leadership are again only the symptoms, not the cause.

What confronts us is the question of how literally half the population of the United States could be cozened, bamboozled, and lured backward into the Tory mindset that Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, and all the other supposedly revered forefathers and foremothers of the original American Revolution decried and laid their lives on the line to put behind us.

In short, in the case of the pathology of Bush’s enablers and followers, we face a pivotal historic challenge to human evolution.  We face the need for a Point Four or Marshall Plan not just for saving people elsewhere, but for the reclamation and rebuilding of the American mind.

From a press release dated January 1, 2008

Based on chapter one, The Pathology of Leadership, in Bankrolling Evolution: A Scientific Guide to Global Recovery from the Disaster of the Bush Years, by David Loye.

Dr. Loye is the former Research Director for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA School of Medicine, and author of the award-winning The Healing of a Nation.

Bankrolling Evolution is a year end report to the Council of the Darwin Project (www.thedarwinproject.com) composed of over 50 leading American, European, and Asian scientists.

To back up my own diagnosis for a year end report in print moving into global circulation I did the customary wide search for everything I could find for what other professionals had to say. I offer this quick sketch of results as a public service in a critical time.

“The first jolt was this. During nearly seven years of increasing alarm, out of more than 200,000 psychiatrists and psychologists in America, only a scanty handful dared to risk losing a client or a research grant—or were able to gain more than a paragraph or a stray column in the media—to publicly state what in private they knew or suspected was the case.

The lone bold public diagnosis in a whole book by a bona fide psychiatrist was Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Dr. Justin Frank, a highly respected psychoanalytic practitioner and professor of psychiatry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The fact Dr. Frank’s rather horrifying diagnosis was published well before the 2004 election, yet could be so widely ignored the president in question was re-elected, indicates why Frank’s findings call for a close new look….

Contrary to the carefully engineered image of the decisive leader grounded in honest and forthright good old time moral values and basic horse sense, the picture of an “untreated ex-alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies” was noted in 2004 reviews. In retrospect this looks like an attempt to describe a tornado with a fuzzy snap shot of a funnel whirling across some distant prairie elsewhere.

Prior to Bush’s re-election, in 2004, chapter by chapter Dr. Frank laid it out for everyone who could bear to read the book. The roots in family and childhood of a “drive to rid the world of dangerous people as not simply the policy judgement of a president—but as the drive of an undernurtured and emotionally hobbled infant, terrified of confronting the dangers within his own psyche.”

Message in the Bottle fills a chapter on how “remarkably little attention has been paid to Bush’s twenty-plus years of problem drinking.”

In God I Trust probes shock after shock foreshadowed by the pre-2000 year election quote: “I feel like God wants me to run for president. . . I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.”

Twisted Tongues probes how “his abuse of language can be seen as the psychic equivalent of a smoker’s persistent cough—easy to overlook, perhaps, but all too frequently a warning that something in the patient has gone very, very wrong.”

Without the professional ability to understand the real world consequences of what Frank was writing—or see the ongoing connection to current and prospective events—this might seem rather mild. But in the chapter Outlaw—which probed the link between a pattern for pathological lying and arrests for disorderly conduct in college days, for drunk driving later, on up to defiance of the U.S. Constitution and international law—what Dr.Frank is getting at begins to come across with full tornado force.

“He behaves more and more like a criminal who sticks tenaciously to his story,” Frank wrote—later noting “The individual who lives outside the law ultimately stops seeing the world as being real.”

Relentlessly, but also with a touch of the healer’s compassion conspicuously missing from so-called compassionate conservatives, Dr. Frank ticked off more of the symptoms that thousands of American psychiatrists and psychologists recognized, and commented on privately, but publicly, or by exclusion from the media, remained silent.

The symptoms of Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD—short attention span, impulsiveness, disinterest in abstractions or complexities, impatient, easily frustrated, poor control of emotions.

The symptoms of dyslexia, or the symbol-processing difficulty recorded in all the purportedly humorous little books compiling the scrambling and mangling of words and thoughts when forced to speak without a script.

“He may seem decisive, but his behavior represents the fall-back position of someone trying to manage the anxiety of not being able to think clearly,” Dr. Frank observed.

Here Frank’s analysis most directly connects with my own experience as a psychologist.

It’s a mistake to try to write off the American president in question—or any alarming leader who anywhere else, as in Iran or North Korea, gains power—as “stupid,” or as only the simple puppet of others.

You don’t gain the kind of power in question without unusual “street smart” personal survival skills and capacities as an actor able to both disarm and instill the crazy-making roller-coaster mix of hope with an underlying gut-cutting edge of fear into the pliable others.

As with the pathology of leaders past, present, and—should we again fail to learn from history —the future, we’re faced with the riddle of what seems to be an unstable amalgam of two or more people. Crafted both by oneself and by others paid to do so—as is customary for most people of celebrity or notoriety—one persona is the reasonably “normal” person that his adherents and supporters see, prone then to discount anything that conflicts with this impression.

Another persona, however, is the quite definitely “abnormal” man behind the “normal” man that psychologists, psychiatrists, and both progressives and in this case many alarmed conservatives have come to see, prone then to discount anything that conflicts with this impression.

The psychiatric diagnosis here is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DSM-IV, 300.14), or as it used to be known, Multiple Personality Disorder.

My own research with dyslexia and background in testing long ago sensitized me to the link between the quasi-normal or otherwise impaired intellect and the development of both positive and highly commendable, and negative and immensely destructive, compensatory capacities for coping with these deficits.

Along with a high degree of gut level shrewdness, as Frank documents, this syndrome can include truly incredible skills for lying, cheating, and the fashioning of the blend of charming and bullying that allows one to get away with it and continue to advance despite a history of failures.

The problem with being able to gain power in this way—while beneath the facade one is unable to think or express oneself clearly—is what has become the globally unsettling question for our time.

Why has the world so rapidly fallen apart during the Bush years? Again documented by Dr. Frank, what happened during the Bush years is a case of what in my report I suggest be called the Global Family Breakdown Factor.

A familiar scenario for family counselors and therapists is the case where after a period of stability, where both parents and children pretty much know what to expect of each other, one or more of the parents begins to act not at all “like himself or herself normally,” or a disruptive new mate comes into the picture who’s not “like mom or dad was.”

Suddenly the children begin to whine, become defiant, to hit and fight among themselves, one or more may become so violent this family literally falls apart and winds up in the police station or in mandatory therapy…

Even when rulers are tyrannical and hated, troubled nations and empires tend to hang together as long as the rulers act according to reasonable expectation. But a grounding fact for the new psychiatry of evolution I propose in my report is recognition that central power figures serve among nations as stabilizing analogues to the father or the mother in a family. And when the actions of these power figures exceed a certain limit—when they depart so radically from expectations long established through customs, laws, treaties, and values in common that both leaders and followers elsewhere have no idea of what they might do next—like a jug dropped to the floor breaking into pieces, or like breakdown in a family, the region or world falls apart….

The problem with this kind of morass for leadership is that it leaves one open to becoming the tool of one’s pathology and the agenda of a conventionally intelligent but morally defective clique or cabal of designing others—as can be seen in the case of the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, corporatist, rightwing televangelist, and neoCon combine.

In chapter six, The Smirk, Dr. Frank documented the grim and unsettling deficit that the current furor about the top down authorization of torture and the missing tapes has at last broke through to seize the consciousness and the conscience of Americans. Behind the “tough guy” smirk—which countless photos reveal this president shares with all of the above—lies the self-protective projection of contempt for others and the escalation of a deeply ingrained sadism and delight in destruction, which calls to mind tales of the deviant youth foreshadowing the deviant adult power of Nero and similar emperors during the decline and fall of Rome.

Well documented in the case of Bush is the picture of the boy who delights in blowing up frogs by shoving lighted firecrackers down their gullet.

Who becomes the fraternity president who delights in branding pledges with a red hot coat hanger to the naked rear—who when asked about it says it was “Insignificant! There’s no scarring mark physically or mentally!”

Who as governor, after blessing the execution of the first woman for Texas, delights in mocking her—“Please don’t kill me,” photos show him whimpering, lips pursed in mock desperation.

Who even in seemingly harmless nick names delights in this way of subtle demeaning and trying to dominate and control followers, enablers, and leaders of other nations. “Turd blossom,” for example, for his notorious political advisor Karl Rove. “Pooty-poot” for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Of course it is uncomfortable to be forced to face this.

One wants to run away and hide for shame.

But beyond history, within the over-riding perspective of evolution, everything we know about and the function of catharsis in psychiatry tells us it’s absolutely crucial Americans be officially forced—that is, beyond any possibility of evasion—to face the fact this was a man, and a cohort, and an ethos, they twice allowed to be engineered into election and re-election. And yet here we sit with the astonishment of a clear cut U.S.Constitutional case for impeachment and imprisonments—as happened in the case of Nixon and Watergate; a continuing lack of the sufficiently relentless congressional and the other needed official investigations of what, why, and what can be done about what happened; and a blind lemming intransigence of ongoing leadership for the disgraced Republican party and a waffling school boy ongoing leadership for the nation’s only hopeful alternative Democratic party.

In Dr. Frank’s final chapter, I Am the Chief, the roar of the dark inner funnel bursts out of the distance into one’s own living room.

“The evidence suggests that behind Bush’s affable exterior operates a powerful but obscure delusional system that drives his behavior,” Dr. Frank observed. “The most precise psychiatric term to describe his pathology is most frequently used to identify a particular condition exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we’ll see, has broader applications as well: megalomania.”

Technically, megalomania is not per se insanity, being endemic among thousands of us still classified and operating as normal among CEOs and other leadership figures globally. In the nine pages concluding this chapter Dr.Frank explains what megalomania is in consequences to rival the paintings of hell by Heironomous Bosch.

“Megalomaniacs love to break things,” he observed. “It makes them feel all powerful.”

To the defining symptoms Frank lists can be linked specific policies, actions, events—and, again and again, the unsettling unguarded glimpses behind the mask—of the Bush years. Yet to the astonishment of much of the rest of the world an amazing number of Americans have been able to discount what happened to the nation originally founded to serve as a beacon of hope to the world as no more than the fun and free-for-all partisanship of a good prize fight or football game.

Which brings us to the pathology of enablers and followers. And the virus that remains in the bloodstream of America when Bush and cohort are gone. And the requirement for the investigation and exposure by a shamed and emboldened Congress and mainstream media to provide the catharsis required for our healing.

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Assume the fetal position!

by Frank Schirrmacher, 04. Oktober 2008

Maybe the worst isn’t what George W. Bush took from us. The worst is what he gave us. All the farewells from him, from Washington, from America are nothing but losses of our illusions, helplessly postponed…. Conceptually, Bush has put democracies into slavery by using its constitutional vocabulary, be it „freedom“ or „dignity of man“, as instrument of his exercise of power. Farewells from the loyalty to the United States, from its apotheosis of the good life and its might, as we can read in all newspapers? Instead, we have received something we cannot say farewell to: the shameful experience of a deep unfaithfulness towards ourselves, the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, a dislocation of identity unknown in the annals of free societies….

For years Bush has forced the whole world to dwell in his head, to interpret each and all of his intentions, to devour his personal logic, to flee his resolutions, and to fear his memory because it was, as he himself confessed, a memory that didn’t forget any humiliation. He seemed to be a case for the youth psychologist, and similarly for his staff members when he interrupted important meetings with the rude remark that he still had „to ride at other rodeos“.

But what it meant for his contemporaries to be forced endemically into his thinking apparatus was noticed first by inhabitants of the deepest depths, those literary intellectual beings that illuminate the night with their own glow. At the same hour that George Bush, roping the world into his thinking process with words like democracy, freedom and self defense, established an interior surveillance system reaching like a thought police into every library and every laboratory, the novelist John Berger predicted a reeducation towards fear, a vegetative state in which the body knows already what the brain doesn’t even guess: „The pain to live in the contemporary world.“ Berger described precisely what constituted the essence of power of this administration: „Ideology apart, its power is based on two threats. The first is the intervention from the sky by the most heavily armed state in the world. One could call it Threat B 52. The second is of ruthless indebtedness, bankruptcy, and hence, given the present productive relations in the world, starvation. One could call it Threat Zero.“

We have now entered Phase Zero. It is about to become a historic event. To multiply with zero is a mathematical operation that is left for us by this president. The only problem is that it is applicable not to him alone. What stock owners sense when they don’t own anything any more after years of accumulation holds also true for our thinking and acting. Bush has multiplied freedom, democracy, prosperity with zero. With borrowed ideals, he has devalued these ideals. „We’ve never seen a presidential meltdown like this. This is a terrible loss, and a dangerous one, for the whole world is watching“, wrote Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s former head speech writer, the other day in the Wall Street Journal.

While the United States Secretary of the Treasury, as if to outline this implosion, literally fell to his knees in front of his country’s representatives and while the president „spoke like a man who was a mere commentator, not the leader in the crisis“ (Noonan), the world observes and knows that those who pretend to be healers have caused the disease. Now „House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks“ decide about the world’s economic future, wrote Thomas L. Friedman, columnist of the New York Times, in a dramatic plea. „I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package. But his moment is the scariest of all for me because the previous three were all driven by real or potential attacks on the U.S. system by outsiders. This time, it’s our own failure.“

The western societies have anticipated many things but not this attack from the inside. It is downright incredibly comprehensive, from the rhetorical preparations for the war with Iraq to the climate policy, the attack on the constitution, the surveillance of all intellectual and scientific endeavours and ending in the implosion of the financial system. The gigantic mountain that is in this system of fear the threat from the outside, emerges as emotional dislocation of fear of the innermost. By now the declaration of war against terror shows the traits of a forceful challenge to the traditional European idea of mankind.
This president leaves behind all of the world’s democracies in a deeply traumatized state, and you ask yourself, what person or what event of the last sixty years could have done the same or if it could have happened outside the democratic realm. In contrast to China, Russia and Bin-Laden-Terrorism, all profiting from Bush’s reign, democracies always encountered in the person of Bush the „king’s two bodies“; he was Bush, but he also was the representative of the idea of freedom and democracy. He has taken away this deference to the existing, and as he took away, he gave something back: Mistrust of others and himself, lack of comprehension towards foreign law and foreign happiness, incompetence as a political variation of a policy of arbitrariness.

Above all in Germany, in a country whose gratefulness towards the liberators of 1945 has become historic, the whole extent of moral ruin will show itself only after Bush’s departure. There were many people, and many intelligent people who believed him and followed him for a while when he shored up his Iraq policy with talk about weapons of mass destruction and referrals to the Third Reich. While the intellectual left may feel itself vindicated in the catastrophes of the existing order and draw from it lessons for the course of history, the German bourgeoisie that came together in the great people’s parties of the years after World War II hasn’t developed a utopia that pointed appreciably beyond the American dream and the primal confidence in its democratic guaranties. The removal of this vanishing point is, as Russia and China demonstrate, not at all the end of capitalism. The threat now is the lasting division and regression of democracy and capitalism, a disruption that originated in Bush’s misuse of the political rhetoric of freedom. In the worst case scenario this won’t be any more the world of western cosmopolitanism whose liberal foundations belonged to the greatest achievements modern societies have to offer. Without any irony Friedman advises them: „Assume the fetal position!“

Bush begins to forget. And a disturbed world hopes that an Obama is enough to heal the wounds. But if the world doesn’t understand what wounds it has inflicted on itself, it won’t advance any more to the optimistic, happiness seeking and in the end even loving ego that slumbers embryonically in the innermost core of our democratic and social ideals. „In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism“, John Berger writes. „Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to mean. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang’s code-word, stolen from humanity.“

But Bush hasn’t just taken, he has given back: a changed reality of the constitution, freedom deformed and happiness destroyed. Shaken by the financial crisis, the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley announced in The New York Times a few days ago the preliminary „end of ideals“. Maybe this last, quasi materialistic ruin of ideals is the endpoint. Bush multiplies us with zero. The European societies must painstakingly learn again to count together one and one to be able to begin anew.

Really Simply Stolen from Kevin Kelly’s Technium:

The paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn’t know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance. New and better tools permit us new and better questions. All our knowledge about subatomic particles derived from the new questions generated after we invented an atom smasher.

Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially.  In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.

We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology and tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed… In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet. Or, to put it another way, we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance.

Photography: Kevin Kelly

A friend of mine sent me these along with the following comments. God bless his sense of humor:

I thought reality had become so bizarre that cartoonist would be out of job: I thought they could not exaggerate human folly beyond reality, but I was wrong… I really admire how such people get the essence of the absurdity and manage to draw that with a few lines. I still feel that we should shift from democracy to cartoonocracy: the cartoonist clearly will be better in governing the world than the politicians.

Glass ceiling reaches new high (or low):

Jack Cafferty unloaded on Sarah Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric Friday afternoon on CNN, telling Wolf Blitzer, “There’s a reason the McCain campaign keeps Governor Palin away from the press.” After showing a clip of Palin stumbling over Couric’s question about the bailout and offering an answer connecting the bailout to healthcare, Cafferty asked, “Did you get that?” He warned the viewers: “If John McCain wins this woman will be one 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from being President of the United States. And if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should.”

Published: 13:00 EST, September 24, 2008 by PHYSORG.com.

Political conservatives operate out of a fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness, a new Northwestern University study soon to be published in the Journal of Research in Personality finds.

“Social scientists long have assumed that liberals are more rational and less fearful than conservatives, but we find that both groups view the world as a dangerous place,” says Dan McAdams, study co-author and professor of human development and psychology at Northwestern University. “It’s just that their fears emerge differently.”

To better understand the differences between politically conservative Christian Americans and their liberal counterparts, McAdams and Northwestern University co-author Michelle Albaugh asked 128 socially active churchgoers this question: What if there were no God?

“Social scientists — who are generally liberals — have for decades done research to figure out what makes conservatives tick,” says McAdams. The study, “What if there Were No God? Politically Conservative and Liberal Christians Imagine their Lives without Faith,” [is] available online to journal subscribers.

Like the Northwestern study, the preponderance of research finds that conservatives fear unchecked human impulses that challenge the status quo. What McAdams and Northwestern researcher Albaugh also find is an underlying, but different, fear that drives liberals as well.

“Political conservatives envision a world without God in which baser human impulses go unchecked, social institutions (marriage, government, family) fall apart and chaos ensues,” says McAdams. Liberals, on the other hand, envision a world without God as barren, lifeless, devoid of color and reasons to live.

“Liberals see their faith as something that fills them up and, without it, they conjure up metaphors of emptiness, depletion and scarcity,” McAdams said. “While conservatives worry about societal collapse, liberals worry about a world without deep feelings and intense experiences.”

The study findings may shed light on why conservatives prefer more authoritarian leaders while liberals do not, he adds.

“What’s clear is that it is their political and not religious orientation that underlies the different psychologies of political conservatives and liberals,” says McAdams. After all, all of the adults he and Northwestern researcher Albaugh studied were members of churches, and their data suggested that most were socially involved, altruistic people.

The Northwestern University study sample included 128 highly religious and politically active Americans who attend church regularly. Although nationally conservatives are more likely to attend church than liberals, the Northwestern study was set up to sample equally from religious conservatives and religious liberals.

The researchers also observed gender differences, but said they did not interfere with the relationship between political orientation and narrative themes. The study is part of a larger project that looks at the relationships of faith, politics and life stories in well-functioning American adults. It is funded by the Foley Family Foundation in Milwaukee.

Source: Northwestern University

(via ImpactLab)

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Ohio, for President!

If YouTube is too slow to serve this clip, you can download it HERE (12.5MB).
(Select Free User and wait the indicated number of seconds, then click Download.)

Watch or Download

At last it makes some sense.

Producers site

Watch or Download

Those with the darkest nightmares became the most powerful.

In an age when all the grand ideals have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.

A society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, and therefore we lable these people as fundamentalists or fanatics. And they have much greater purchase in terms of the fear they instill in society than they truly deserve.

Produced by Adam Curtis
Production Company: BBC

BBC Links:

I: Baby It’s Cold Outside

Download: MPEG2 (1 GB) — MPEG 1 (689 MB) — 256Kb MPEG4 (153 MB) — 64Kb MPEG4 (67 MB)

II: The Phantom Victory

Download: MPEG2 (1 GB) — MPEG 1 (617 MB) — 256Kb MPEG4 (153 MB) — 64Kb MPEG4 (67 MB)

III: The Shadows In The Cave

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Wikipedia

The Scientific and Medical Network Blog, Thursday, 25 September 2008

“Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism,” Alvin Plantinga writes in the current issue of AntiMatters (2:3, 79–84).

Naturalism is a form of realism, the dubious nature of which was already known in the 6th century BCE, when Xenophanes wrote: “Even if a man were to represent to himself the world exactly as it is, he could not discover that this is the case.” Unfortunately, Western philosophy (including and more so its late offspring, science) has largely ignored this truism, to its own detriment.

Current scientific theories of perception—the direct ones (Michaels & Carello, 1981) as well as the indirect ones—agree that the goal of perception is to approximate or match true properties of an objective physical environment. In spite of significant philosophical scepticism ever since Xenophanes, this assumption is rarely questioned in the scientific study of perception.

In his highly commendable book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (Norton 1998/2000), the final chapter of which is reproduced in AntiMatters 1:2 (189-201), Donald D. Hoffman argues that our sensory systems are shaped by natural selection to allow homo sapiens to survive within its niche, not to present it with a faithful depiction of its niche. We do not expect the sensory system of a cockroach, a gecko, or a chipmunk to reveal the true nature of reality. We expect it to give simple signals suited for survival in a particular niche. Why should our sensory system be different in this respect? According to Hoffman, the phenomenal world is a species-specific user interface. A user interface, like your computer’s desktop with its icons, is useful precisely because it does not resemble what it represents. A file icon hides the complexity of the hardware and software that makes it so useful as a representation of a file.

The neuropsychological data suggest that vision is a sophisticated process of construction based on sparse sensory cues. While this encourages the notion that the visual world is a construction rather than a reconstruction, the fact that we have learned as much about the process of construction as we did seems to argue that the construction is, nevertheless, a reconstruction.

Or does it? What we have learned is that if a neuropsychologist puts in front of me what looks to her like a square, then I am aware of something that looks to me like a square. If this is a reconstruction, it is my reconstruction of her construction. If she can find in my visual cortex a “square neuron” that fires whenever she puts in front of me what looks to her like a square, this signals to her a correlation between the behaviour of my square neuron and the presence of a square in her phenomenal world. And while she is surely entitled to infer a similar correlation between the behaviour of my square neuron and the presence of a square in my phenomenal world, the inference of a real square over and above our phenomenal squares (and the firing of square neurons) seems unwarranted.

Darwin might have agreed. “With me,” he wrote in a letter to William Graham, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” The belief in the combination of naturalism and evolution may be true, but it would be irrational to hold it, as Darwin’s “horrid doubt” suggests, and as Plantinga has argued rather convincingly.

According to Plantinga (AntiMatters 2:3, 79–84), Darwin’s doubt does not arise “for those who believe in God,” by which he of course means the Christian version. “If God has created us in his image,” he reasons, “then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals.”

From my Indianized perspective, this notion appears wanting in several respects. As pointed out in my comment (AntiMatters 2:3, 85–86), what evolution has in the works may not be merely an image of God but God himself or herself. The human species is certainly an important step in this direction, but not more. According to Sri Aurobindo, it is “a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.” Our species “cannot be the end and highest height of the mysterious upward surge of Nature…. A godhead is imprisoned in our depths, one in its being with a greater godhead ready to descend from superhuman summits. In that descent and awakened joining is the secret of our future. Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible.” So we shouldn’t let ourselves be bamboozled into thinking that we are ready to see the world with God’s eyes. According to Sri Aurobindo, our mind is but “a clumsy interlude between Nature’s vast and precise subconscient action and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead.”

Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, 1984, pp. 140–141) once asked a therapeutic group “whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not.” He then pushed forward with the following question: “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”

There is. At any rate, there will be. This world beyond man’s world is man’s world transformed by the transformation of his consciousness—a topic that was as important to Jean Gebser as it was to Sri Aurobindo. According to Gebser, whose magnum opus The Ever-Present Origin is summarized in AntiMatters 2:3 (51–78), human consciousness has undergone a series of mutations, each of which has enriched our world by a new (qualitative rather than quantitative) dimension. Presently it is undergoing a mutation from its mental or “perspectival” structure to its integral or “aperspectival” one.

The consciousness structure preceding the mental apprehended a world of images. The mental structure was the first that was capable of synthesizing images into a system of self-existent objects. This three-dimensional “coagulation” of two-dimensional images is what we call “matter.” It came into being with the mental structure, and it is bound to be transcended—at any rate, put in its place—with the consolidation of the integral structure. Matter, Gebser predicts, will “open up” and become the transparent “surface” of a four-dimensional reality, and the human self will escape from its perspectively fixed vantage point and discover its identity with the ever-present Origin.

RSSed (really simply stolen) from Dean Radin’s blog Entangled Minds

The National Science Foundation publishes a biannual report called Science and Engineering Indicators. It’s a comprehensive review (588 pages in the 2008 report) of developments in the US relevant to science and engineering, including a section on the public understanding of science. I’ve been tracking this report for years to see how the NSF views what it regards as “pseudoscience.” That word first appeared in its 2000 report.

Exemplars of pseudoscience in that year’s report included “yogic flying, therapeutic touch, astrology, fire walking, voodoo magical thinking, Uri Geller, placebo, alternative medicine, channeling, Carlos hoax, psychic hotlines and detectives, near death experiences, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, homeopathy, faith healing, and reincarnation.” For a section of an NSF report supposedly concerned with the lack of critical thinking skills, this is one of the most peculiar, and as such inadvertently ironic, lists I can imagine. Surely it should have also included Santa Claus and Batman.

References in this section clearly cite as their source the rabidly skeptical society formerly known as CSICOP. Not surprisingly, the wording makes it appear that belief in such pseudosciences indicates that the US educational system is devolving dangerously into a hellish middle ages. A footnote in the 2000 report cites as evidence of this mental decline the “‘most frightening” results of a poll of students in Columbia’s graduate school of journalism: 57 percent of the student journalists believed in ESP.”

Three pages of this report are devoted to such arguments. The author’s disdain for the woefully ignorant masses (apparently including grad students at Columbia) is palpable.

The 2002 report also devotes about three pages to a discussion of pseudoscience, and again, you can practically feel the author’s veins throbbing as you read through this section. Fortunately (for the sake of the NSF’s credibility), the word “placebo” is no longer provided as an example of pseudoscience, nor is “Uri Geller.” In the 2004 report this section shrinks to about one page and is not quite as strident. In the 2006 report the pseudoscience list again shrinks, now to less than a page, and it cites as examples of pseudoscience only “astrology, lucky numbers, the existence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), extrasensory perception (ESP), and magnetic therapy.”

The 2008 report shrinks to two paragraphs and only gives astrology as an example.

This trend is the right direction, and the hysterically skeptical tone in earlier reports seems to be calming down. I take this as a favorable sign. I’m completely in favor of improved science education, which should include not just critical thinking, but also how to tell the difference between skepticism and pseudoskepticism. A few lessons on humility might not hurt either.

Amazon.com has over 7,500 books containing “quantum” in their titles or subtitles. A selection from the first 500 (according to “relevance”):

• 2012: Archangelic Answers And Practices For The Quantum Leap
• A Manual of Quantum Sufism
• A Quantum Weight Loss Approach
• Creating the Quantum Organization
• Distant Healing, Bilocation, Medical Intuition & Prayer in a Quantum World
• Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness
• How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul
• How to Use the Astounding Secrets of Quantum Physics to Create the Life You Want
• Magickal Self Defense: A Quantum Approach to Warding
• Parallel Lifetimes: Fluctuations in the Quantum Field
• Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality
• Playing the Quantum Field: How Changing Your Choices Can Change Your Life
• Quantum-Touch: The Power to Heal
• Quantum Consciousness: The Guide to Experiencing Quantum Psychology
• Quantum Creativity: Nine Principles to Transform the Way You Work
• Quantum Evolution: How Physics’ Weirdest Theory Explains Life’s Biggest Mystery
• Quantum Faith
• Quantum Fitness
• Quantum Golf: The Path to Golf Mastery
• Quantum Grace
• Quantum Healing
• Quantum Leadership
• Quantum Learning: Unleashing the Genius in You
• Quantum Medicine: A Guide to the New Medicine of the 21st Century
• Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology
• Quantum Organizations: A New Paradigm for Achieving Organizational Success and Personal Meaning
• Quantum Prophecy
• Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World
• Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World
• Quantum Society
• Quantum Success: The Astounding Science of Wealth and Happiness
• Quantum Teaching: Orchestrating Student Success
• Quantum Thinking : Creative Thinking, Planning and Problem Solving
• Quantum Wellness: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Health and Happiness
• Revisiting Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Perspective of Quantum Mechanics
• Supercharging Quantum Touch: Advanced Techniques
• Taking The Quantum Leap To Happiness
• The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
• The Quantum Brain: The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man
• The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist’s Guide to Health and Healing
• The Quantum Leader: Applications for the New World of Work
• The Quantum Mind and Healing: How to Listen and Respond to Your Body’s Symptoms
• The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life
• The Quantum Self
• The Quantum World of Energy Healing
• The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist’s Guide to Enlightment
• Thog’s Guide to Quantum Economics
• What Quantum Physics Tells Us about Our Origins and How We Should Live