Posted by: N.S. Palmer | May 11, 2013

Who Is “Doctor Who”?

By N.S. Palmer

Photo: Tablet Magazine.

Photo: Tablet Magazine.

The current issue of Tablet Magazine features an article titled “Doctor Who? Doctor Jew” that examines the parallels between Judaism and the popular BBC television series.

The similarities are interesting, but I’m not sure that they are intentional. The original writer for the show was Sydney Newman, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants who got a job at the BBC just as “Doctor Who” was being planned. Most of the similarities probably reflect ideas that were floating around in Newman’s head.

The most striking parallel was introduced a few years later, as a way to change the lead actor in a long-running (1963-present) television series:

The Doctor, a member of a superior race called the Time Lords, occasionally slips into a new body, acquiring not only a new face but also a new personality.

The article doesn’t dwell on that particular correspondence, perhaps because modern secular Jews find it slightly embarrassing. However, traditional Jewish belief allows for reincarnation, called gilgul neshamot, which allows people to improve themselves and to rectify wrongs that they committed in previous lifetimes. As Rabbi Arnie Singer writes in The Outsider’s Guide to Orthodox Judaism:

According to some mystical teachings, it is possible for a soul to be reincarnated into a new body … This provides the soul the opportunity for Tikkun: correcting the faults that prevented it from reaching its full spiritual potential. A person’s suffering might actually be a Tikkun for something his soul did in a previous life. (p.15)

Of course, the Doctor manages to reincarnate “in place.” He skips over conception, birth, and childhood. He reincarnates as an adult, with all his memories intact, in the same physical location and even wearing the same clothes. A lot of us would like to know that trick!

The article also spotlights what it sees as the Doctor’s unusual relationship with time:

His relation is not to space, a place to call his own, but to time …

Before the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E., Judaism was like most other religions in focusing on “sacred space.” Sacred space consists of specific locations or structures that are set aside for (and often chosen by) the Deity. Many Jewish practices and beliefs of that era involved sacrifices and rituals in the temple.

After the temple was destroyed and the Jewish people were scattered, practices that depended on the temple were impossible. As a solution, Rabbinic Judaism developed practices involving “sacred time.” Sacred time consists of days or durations that serve the same purpose as sacred space, sanctifying certain actions and dedicating them to God. For example, Orthodox Jews see the Sabbath as sacred time, so they don’t work or do anything that changes the state of the universe between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. That time is set aside for worship, ritual, and religious study.

Sabbath observance is an example — almost all religions have them — of what I call “this is our story and we’re sticking to it.” Modern Jewish scholars concede that there is scant Biblical support for the Sabbath practice. They think that the ancient rabbis misinterpreted the Biblical texts on which they based their decision.

Another example is provided by Jewish dietary laws that are based on a passage in which the same Hebrew word could mean “milk” or “fat,” depending on the missing vowels. Modern scholars believe that because the ancient rabbis assumed the Bible was perfect, they thought it could not contain redundancies. Reading the word as “fat” would have reiterated a law stated elsewhere in the text. As a result, the rabbis read the word incorrectly as “milk,” yielding the interpretation that a Jew may not cook, eat, or profit from food that combines meat and dairy products.

Anyway, Jewish practice is closely associated with sacred time in ways that practices of other religions are not. So there is at least a slight connection to Doctor Who.

That said, the Doctor’s time machine travels both in time and space. Even its name, TARDIS, is an acronym for “Time And Relative Dimensions in Space.” It doesn’t just sit in one place and travel through time, à la Rod Taylor’s invention in “The Time Machine.” So I think that saying the Doctor is specially related to time and not to space is, well, reading a lot into the text.

The article finally refers to a big mystery about the Doctor’s name:

They travel the world with the sole purpose of assassinating the Doctor, lest he answer the oldest question in the universe. That question? It’s right there in the show’s title: Doctor Who? And yet this is precisely what is going to happen next week. Steven Moffat, the creative force behind the series’ current reincarnation, has promised that the revelation will shake the show to its core …

I don’t know what the big revelation will be, but if Moffat wants to be theologically correct, then the Doctor has no name: that’s the secret.

Names only apply when we see the world as a fragmentary and disconnected bag of separate things. That’s our particular plane of reality. But above that plane, we can see all things (including people) as connected aspects of the same, unitary reality. If the Doctor is some kind of transcendent being, he doesn’t have a “real name.”

Moffat’s big reveal might tell us just how Jewish the Doctor really is.

Copyright 2013 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | February 9, 2013

Happiness is the Journey, Not the Destination

By N.S. Palmer

A recent article on LiveScience.com reported that people’s happiness depends partly on the generation into which they were born.

It’s true that each generation has its own set of challenges. But a lot of our happiness comes from “attitude, attitude, attitude.”

Earlier generations expected life to be difficult. They expected to fight their way through it to become the people they wanted to be.

More recently, however, we have been taught the opposite: That life should be easy, that everything should be served to us on a silver platter, and that wishing will make it so. Those are the delusions behind the so-called “secret” of countless books on self-help and pop psychology.

But for the vast majority of us, it’s not true now and it has never been true.

Happiness comes from accepting life’s challenges. It comes from meeting those challenges to fight for what is important to us.

Whether we win or lose the fight does matter, but it matters less than the simple fact that we engage in the fight.

Earthly happiness is not an end point, but a by-product of the struggle. It is the journey, not the destination.

None of this is original with me, of course. It has been taught by many thinkers throughout the centuries. My late friend and mentor, Brand Blanshard, stated it with characteristic wit and eloquence in a letter he sent me many years ago:

It is important to happiness not to think too much about it. The person who continually asks himself if he is happy is apt to miss his end. For happiness is, as Aristotle thought, a byproduct of healthful and successful activity. Bertrand Russell, who wrote The Conquest of Happiness, remarked that scientists are generally happier than artists, since they are more commonly lost in objective tasks and not examining their own navels. What is important is to find what one can do best (generally also the line most useful to others), and then to do it with all one’s might. Happiness will come unsought. If one seeks it directly, one will be like the discontented, rich old ladies who haunt Miami hotels.

Live life with all your might: that’s what life is for. Happiness will take care of itself.

Copyright 2013 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | December 11, 2012

Why I Am a Conservative

By N.S. Palmer

People sometimes accuse me of being a “liberal.”

There’s some truth in that accusation, because I advocate a few ideas that people identify as liberal: government help for the poor and sick, avoidance of war when possible, environmental protection, public education, and regulation of big business to protect the public good.

But neither liberalism nor conservatism is a clearly-defined viewpoint.

Ted Olson, a Republican lawyer who worked for the “conservative” Bush-Cheney regime, represented plaintiffs in a lawsuit to legalize gay marriage. That’s usually identified as a liberal issue.

Meanwhile, numerous “liberal” politicians and commentators see nothing wrong with warrantless wiretapping, imprisonment without charges, or murder by drone as long as it’s a Democratic president doing those things. Those activities are usually identified as things that conservatives support.

The fact is that human life and society are too complex and unpredictable to reduce to a few simple slogans, such as “support the free market” or “provide help to the needy.” One needs to look at the facts of each situation, consult the relevant moral principles and historical examples, then decide on a case-by-case basis.

Conservatism means different things in different times and to different people. In his book The Conservative Mind, the influential thinker Russell Kirk identified six common tenets of conservative thought:

Russell-Kirk

Russell Kirk in a typical pose. He also wrote ghost stories and lived in a “haunted house” on Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan.

1. “Belief in a transcendent order.”

In other words, God exists, and He’s pissed as Hell.

2. “Affection for the proliferating variety of human existence.”

In other words, support for real diversity of belief, culture, and practice instead of fake diversity that has to be enforced by politically-correct censorship.

3. “Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes.”

In other words, all people are equal in dignity and in their basic human rights. All people are entitled to respectful and compassionate treatment. However, those are about the only ways in which they are equal.

4. Belief “that freedom and property are closely linked.”

In other words, a system based mainly on private property tends to maximize freedom and prosperity as long as it’s guided by a wise system of laws. If it’s not guided by a wise system of laws, then you get contemporary America.

5. Suspicion of plans to reconstruct society based on abstract ideology.

In other words, any goofball scheme can seem reasonable in the abstract, as long as it’s not evaluated against the lessons of human history. Turning society upside down in pursuit of abstract justice can cause a lot of real-life injustice.

6. Recognition that change is not necessarily a good thing.

In other words, as Dr. Kirk warns, “hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.”

I have a pretty similar list but would put it in more common-sense terms. I believe:

  • If it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it.
  • If it is broke, then decide if it’s important enough to fix. Not everything is.
  • If it’s broke and you decide to fix it, then fix it slowly and carefully so you don’t make it worse.
  • Look at history to see what worked and what didn’t.
  • Abstract ideological solutions are probably wrong.
  • All people are equal in dignity and rights, but differ in most other respects.
  • God exists, but He’s not pissed as Hell. He’s just very, very disappointed in you.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | December 8, 2012

A Proposal for Truth in Religion

By N.S. Palmer

“Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anyone with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”

-- Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible (1884)

What Matthew Arnold wrote 1884 is still true today. It applies to most religious faiths: Not just to Christianity, but to traditional Judaism and Islam. It applies to any faith that incorporates supernatural events such as miracles, virgin births, Divine interventions, or personal appearances by God on earth.

I’m not foolish enough to claim that I know such things did not happen or could not happen. The world is full of surprises.

What I do claim, with respect and love for my believing friends, is that such accounts are not historically credible.

That claim is nothing new. David Hume and Baruch Spinoza both criticized historical accounts of miracles.

But could such accounts be true in a slightly different way?

We already know that truth means different things in different contexts. A mathematical truth such as “2+2 = 4″ is true in a different way from an empirical truth such as “There is an elephant in the living room,” and both are different from a moral truth such as “Honesty is a virtue.”

Why not assume that religious truths are also special, with their own kind of truth and their own criteria for correctness?

Let’s look at characteristics of a true proposition that matters to us:

  • It’s helpful.
  • It’s important.
  • It either corresponds to a “fact” or logically coheres with a system of judgments.

As an aside, a careful analysis of so-called “facts” reveals that they are thoroughly imbued with judgment. There’s no such thing as a “brute fact” existing independently of interpretation by some mind. As a result, correspondence with facts is just another way of looking at coherence with a system of thought.

Consider a simple fact, such as that I now see the color blue. It refers to “I,” a conscious being; “now,” at a specific point in time, possibly referring to a conventional method of timekeeping; “see,” exercise a sensory faculty of detecting electromagnetic radiation; “the color,” a particular way of experiencing electromagnetic radiation, “blue,” that is, one in an infinite spectrum of colors. The fact both contains within itself and refers to countless concepts, experiences, and activities. It’s more concept than color.

The idea that reality depends on consciousness was a key conclusion of George Berkeley, an empiricist philosopher who famously said “esse est percipi” — “to be is to be perceived.” That led to questions about trees falling in forests where there was no one to hear them: do they make a sound? Berkeley answered that it did, because even if no humans were around to hear it, God was omnipresent, so He was there to hear it.

Berkeley inspired a limerick that was popular at Cambridge before World War I:

There once was a man who said, “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
To find that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.”

“Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd.
I am always about in the quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by, Yours Faithfully,
God.”

But that’s a topic for another time. It has been treated better than I could by my late friend and mentor, Brand Blanshard, in his book The Nature of Thought.

Consider a true proposition that’s known to every school child:

The earth revolves around the sun, and the sun does not revolve around the earth.

What most people do not know is that the choice between the Copernican (sun-centered) and Ptolemaic (earth-centered) view of the solar system is logically arbitrary. Astronomers say that the earth revolves around the sun not because it is true in some absolute sense — it isn’t — but because it makes astronomical calculations easier.

If one adopts the Ptolemaic view of the solar system, one starts with the proposition that the sun revolves around the earth, as do the other planets and the stars. But therein lies a problem when you look up at the sky to observe the movements of the planets and stars. The planets appear to move backwards a little bit (retrograde motion), then forward in their orbits, then backward a little bit, and so on.

In the Copernican model, we explain planetary retrograde motion by saying that the earth is also moving relative to those other planets. Copernicus said that they really followed circular orbits because heavenly motion had to be perfect and he considered circles perfect geometric figures; now we know (using roughly the same model) that the orbits are elliptical. However, the planets appear to move backwards because as the earth orbits the sun, it moves relative to the other planets, which are also orbiting the sun.

In the Ptolemaic model, however, the earth isn’t moving. Ptolemaic astronomers had to find some other explanation for planetary retrograde motion. The explanation had to fit all the same observed facts as the Copernican model, but with the earth at the center of the universe. To solve this problem, Ptolemaic astronomers said that as planets and stars orbited the earth, each one of them made smaller circles along its orbit, called “epicycles” (epi = on, cycle = orbit).

Ptolemaic-model

A diagram of epicycles from the book Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution by Michael J. Crowe.

The Ptolemaic model fit observed facts just as well as the later Copernican model did, and it enabled astronomers to predict the movements of heavenly bodies. However, it was more complicated and difficult than the Copernican model. Simplicity might not equal absolute truth, but it has its advantages. So now we all “know” that Copernicus was right, Ptolemy was wrong, and that the earth revolves around the sun.

The point of this digression is that on logical grounds, Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy have equal claims to be true. They represent not inconsistent, but simply different ways of describing astronomical phenomena. And depending on which description you choose, certain propositions will be true or false.

Under the Ptolemaic description, for example, planets move in epicycles as they orbit the earth. Under the Copernican description, they don’t. Which is right? The answer is that in the context of their own assumptions, they are both right. In the context of the other description’s assumptions, they are both wrong.

Those considerations apply in many areas:

  • In physics, relativity (for astronomical phenomena) and quantum mechanics (for sub-atomic phenomena). Each works well in some contexts and not in others.
  • In economics, the labor theory of value and the subjective theory of value. Each works well in some contexts and not in others.
  • In psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Gestalt, behaviorism, and neuroscientific theories. Each works well in some contexts and not in others.

That doesn’t mean there is no truth to be had. But it does mean we should not assume some propositions are false when they are, instead, simply part of alternative descriptions of the world.

What does that have to do with truth in religion? You can probably see where I’m going with this line of thought.

Under different religious descriptions of reality, God dictated the Torah word-for-word to Moses, or He didn’t; Jesus claimed to be the son of God and rose from the dead, or he didn’t; and so forth. Under various secular descriptions of reality, the Bible is a collection of moral teachings, history, and legends assembled by people who sought to improve the lives and conduct of humankind; or it’s a pernicious bag of superstitions. Take your pick. Depending on your point of view, they’re all true.

What I want to argue is that just like Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, different descriptions of the world result in different things being true or false, meaningful or meaningless. And that takes us back to what I said earlier about the characteristics of a true belief that matters to us:

  • It’s helpful.
  • It’s important.
  • It either corresponds to a “fact” or logically coheres with a system of judgments.

Whether one believes in various religious ideas or not, one must acknowledge that they satisfy all three criteria of a true proposition:

  • They help people lead happier, more productive, and more moral lives — not all the time, of course, but usually.
  • They are important, because whether one believes in God or not, the existence and nature of a Creator of the universe is about as important as questions get.
  • They correspond to facts or logically cohere with systems of judgments, that is, with the religious worldviews of which they are a part.

The universe, and our lives, and almost anything can be described in different ways. The different ways don’t conflict because they’re simply looking at the same thing from different angles. From a particular angle, within a particular way of describing the universe, certain things will be true that are not true when considered from a different angle or within a different way of describing the universe.

When confronted with an unfamiliar religious belief, the important question is not “Does it seem true within my worldview?”

The only really important question is: “Is it morally, psychologically, and pragmatically helpful to the people who believe in it?”

As Hillel once said, “The rest is commentary.”

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | November 6, 2012

You Have No Right to Complain

By N.S. Palmer

If you’re an American, then you have no right to complain about the outcome of today’s elections for political office.

If you don’t vote, then you have no right to complain. You had a chance to voice your opinion and you chose not to exercise it.

If you do vote, then you have no right to complain. You participated in the electoral process and agreed to accept the outcome as legitimate.

In either case, as the Transportation Security Agency says at U.S. airports, “Shut up and spread your legs.”

Here’s what will happen no matter who is elected. The U.S. government will:

  • Continue to wiretap your telephone and email, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
  • Continue to attack and occupy countries around the world that have not attacked and pose no threat to the United States, in violation of international law.
  • Continue to imprison and torture people without trial, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, statutory law, and international law.
  • Continue to drone-murder anyone anywhere on nothing but the U.S. president’s say-so, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, statutory law, and international law.
  • Continue to help Wall Street and trans-national corporations loot the American economy, in violation of every principle of justice except (as Thucydides said) “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

You have no right to complain. So shut up and spread your legs.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | September 15, 2012

Romney, Deficits, and Being “Tough-Minded”

By N.S. Palmer

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Democrats and some Republicans (notably Newt Gingrich in his famous video, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town”) portray Mitt Romney as a heartless “vulture capitalist” who’s better at destroying jobs than creating them. I’m not at all sure how inaccurate those portrayals are. I’ve known people very much like that: people who are completely indifferent to the welfare of those outside their own circle.

Of course, I might be wrong: Romney might be the sweetest and most compassionate person on the planet. I just don’t see evidence of that in his background or behavior.

Romney and the Republicans are making a lot of noise about our “deficit problem.” It’s worth noting, by the way, that Republicans see deficits as a problem only when there’s a Democratic president. Under the administration of he-who-shall-not-be-named (let’s call him “BushCheney”), Republicans thought that deficits were a good thing. That’s why they turned the budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton years into trillion-dollar deficits by the end of the BushCheney years. But I digress.

Our government deficit and national debt are long-term problems, not short-term problems. Even liberal lions like Paul Krugman agree that we need to address excessive deficits in the long term. However, our deficits result partly from economic depression. More budget cuts would worsen our economic situation, thereby defeating the purpose of the cuts. We’ve seen exactly that scenario play out in Europe due to the misguided “austerity” policies dictated by the Cameron government in the UK and by Angela Merkel in the EU. Further depressing economic activity would not only cause great hardship (though not on the people who advocate it), but it would make it harder to address the deficit in the long run.

Moreover, our deficit problem does not result mainly from the things that are proposed as cuts: help for the poor and elderly, Obamacare, teacher salaries, and so forth. To the extent that our deficit problem does not result mainly from economic depression, it’s caused mainly by (a) higher medical costs than other developed countries that provide better medical care and (b) inadequate taxes on those who benefit most from the system, including people like Romney. Most people don’t know that in the 1950s, the top income tax bracket was 91 percent, while taxes on capital gains and corporate profits were much higher than today, but economic growth was much better and a family could live comfortably on a single wage-earner’s pay.

Even the most militaristic neo-conservatives must admit that U.S. government’s counter-productive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with its apparent decision to garrison the entire planet, have made our national debt problem much worse. When I was a movement conservative, that was openly discussed as part of the game plan: Run up such huge deficits that we would then be “forced” to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called entitlements, as well as get the government out of areas where we didn’t think it should be in the first place, such as regulating Wall Street and providing public education.

One more general point: There’s a temptation to think that suffering is good for the soul — that the “tough” solution is necessarily the best solution. It’s the same argument that “tough-minded” atheists use to argue against what they see as the weak and cowardly belief in God. It’s no more valid in economics than it is in theology. And the suffering that tough-minded people advocate always falls, surely by coincidence, on people other than themselves.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | August 21, 2012

Ten Things to Remember

By N.S. Palmer

1. Remember that every person you meet deserves to be treated with love and respect.

2. Remember that every person you meet knows something you don’t know.

3. Remember that you’ve been wrong plenty of times, so be open-minded and take other people’s ideas seriously.

4. Remember that even when other people’s ideas are wrong, you should still treat the people themselves with respect. If you disagree, argue the issues and not the people.

5. Remember that you’ve done plenty of things wrong, so be patient and forgiving when other people do it.

6. Remember that God forgives you for what you did wrong, so forgive yourself and focus on doing better.

7. Remember that you can’t change what happened yesterday, so don’t worry about it.

8. Remember that you can change what happens today, in this moment. Are you doing the best thing you could do? Are you being the best person you could be?

9. Remember that tomorrow is promised to no one. Plan for the future but enjoy the present.

10. Remember that nobody around here has all the answers. That includes scientists, religious leaders, teachers, politicians, and you. Trust in the essential goodness of the universe.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | August 1, 2012

What I’ve Learned from Crazy People

By N.S. Palmer

I’ve spent a fair portion of my life dealing with crazy people.

I’m not talking about people who are just odd or excessively emotional. I’m talking about people who are clinically crazy, or who are, to use the technical term, “barking loonies.”

First up was my mother, God bless her. She was one of the most brilliant and talented people I’ve ever known. And completely nuts. Graduated near the top of her medical school class. Played the cello. Wrote astonishing poetry. Knew Ayn Rand. Dated Cary Grant. Also had a lot of anger toward men, enough to make Lorena Bobbitt seem like Natalie Wood. (I suspected that she never forgave her father for “deserting her” by dying when she was a little girl.) She thought that the Mafia was trying to kill her. And the CIA. And Nixon. I told her, “Mom, if the Mafia, the CIA, and Nixon were all trying to kill you, then you’d be dead.” But logic doesn’t work with crazy people.

Then there was my mother’s boyfriend after my original family broke up. He really was in the Mafia: I don’t know how high up. He was too polished and rich to be a street enforcer. Interesting fellow, but a sociopath. One moment, he would treat you like his best friend. Then the next moment, without missing a beat, he’d shoot you dead if you got in his way. He once got me out of some minor trouble in high school by scaring the bejezus out of the school officials. And though I wouldn’t have wanted to be him, he once gave me some reasonable advice, kind of Machiavelli by way of Al Capone: “Always be nice,” he said, “until it’s time not to be nice.”

Then there was one of my friends in college, also a sociopath. A sociopath, by the way, is a person without conscience and empathy. That’s not the same thing as being actively evil. Typically, sociopaths aren’t motivated by the desire to harm others: they just want what they want. And because they have no internal moral sense — like being “color blind” to right and wrong — they’ll do whatever it takes to get what they want. They won’t necessarily seek to harm you, but if you get in their way, they’ll harm you without giving it a second thought.

But back to my college friend the sociopath. As sociopaths often are, he was delightful company, and for a socially inept nerd like me, he was a marvel to watch. His obsession was to bed as many women as possible. His voice, mannerisms, and personality all changed as he sized up his prospective conquests. We were “friends,” but I was careful never to leave my wallet on the table when we were in a restaurant. His only questions in any situation were: “Do I want it?” and “How can I get it?” It wouldn’t have occurred to him that stealing money from a friend was wrong.

He was arrested three times during the years I knew him, and each time, he walked away scot free. On the last occasion — by the way, this was in the newspaper, it’s not just something he told me — the police arrested him for a jewelry store burglary. They caught him with $100,000 of stolen jewels in the trunk of his car. He was released the next day. When I asked about it, he looked me straight in the eye and said that he’d found out who burglarized the store, persuaded the thief to return the jewels, and when the police apprehended him, he’d been taking the jewels back to their rightful owner. Just from the way he said it, you would have thought it was true. He probably believed it was true, because it was in his interest.

Those are some of my most memorable crazy people. There were lots of others. And I learned a few things from them.

Crazy comes in various flavors

People can be crazy in different ways. They can be neurotic, psychotic, or incomplete.

There’s a joke about the difference between neurotics and psychotics. If you ask psychologically healthy people “What’s two plus two,” they answer “four.” If you ask psychotics, they answer “twenty-five” or “Saturday” or something equally nonsensical. If you ask neurotics, they answer “four. But I just can’t stand it!”

Neurotic people repeatedly have inappropriate and unhelpful emotional reactions. Neurotic people are in touch with reality, but their emotions don’t always match the realities they’re in. People who are always angry are neurotic, as are people who always need to please or control others. Control freaks, in particular, seem motivated by overwhelming feelings of insecurity.

Psychotic people aren’t in touch with reality. They might believe that they’re Napoleon, that they’re being controlled by radio waves from the planet Mars, or that they’re secretly married to Britney Spears.

Finally, some people are missing a piece. For sociopaths, it’s conscience and empathy. For nerds, it’s social intelligence. That’s not the same kind of crazy as neurosis or psychosis, but it can be a dangerous or crippling psychological problem.

Crazy has certain advantages

Being crazy has its plus side. Neuroses and psychoses usually satisfy some need. Psychotics, in particular, usually choose a fantasy that helps them feel more important or more in control of their lives. They often create elaborate explanations of why their fantasies, in spite of contrary evidence, are really true.

A divorced, lonely, unemployed man who believes that he’s secretly Napoleon undoubtedly feels happier because of it. The question to ask about a psychotic fantasy is: Does it work for the person? If believing that he’s Napoleon gives a man courage to deal with his troubles, and doesn’t lead him to destructive actions such as invading Russia or taking French lessons, then it’s a helpful psychosis. I wouldn’t take it away from him unless I had something better to replace it.

Likewise, sociopaths can do anything that serves their interests, and they can do it without feeling guilt or remorse. That enables them to lie, steal, kill, and manipulate other people to their hearts’ content. As a result, they have an advantage over people who are disinclined by conscience to do those things. Many politicians are sociopaths, as are many successful businesspeople.

Crazy is a matter of degree

Crazy people aren’t totally different from the rest of us. Neurotics often have appropriate emotional reactions. Psychotics have lucid moments. Even most sociopaths have occasional moments of conscience.

The rest of us all have moments when we react inappropriately to people and situations, such as when we snarl at a sales clerk simply because we’re feeling grumpy. And we often have minor, innocuous neuroses such as being obsessed with our appearance. As long as they don’t cause major problems in our lives, they’re okay.

Like psychotics, we all have fantasies that we create to feel better about ourselves and our lives. Each of us is the “star” of his or her own little drama, with our families and friends as supporting characters. Each of us thinks that he or she is “special:” sometimes it’s true, but just as often, it isn’t. Those fantasies help us get through life and face each day with a modicum of serenity. As long as they don’t lead us to act destructively, they’re a good thing.

Crazy is not open to logical argument

Because crazy reactions and beliefs satisfy people’s innermost needs, we can’t address those reactions and beliefs simply by applying logic. If you have trouble with a control freak at work, it won’t do any good to point out that his or her behavior is both needless and counter-productive. Those aren’t relevant to the control freak’s motivation.

A hundred years ago, the American writer Sinclair Lewis observed that “it’s hard to get a man to know something when his paycheck depends on his not knowing it.” The same applies to beliefs that people adopt to preserve their self-esteem, or to protect their jobs at political think tanks or oil companies. To challenge those beliefs directly is to run straight into a wall of denial and hostility.

However, understanding those facts can help us in two ways.

First, it makes us aware that direct attacks on cherished beliefs won’t work. They’ll only make matters worse.

Second, being aware of our own craziness helps us be more patient and forgiving with the craziness of others. And there’s always plenty of it to forgive.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | July 20, 2012

Drug Policy: Good Is Better Than Perfect

By N.S. Palmer

American laws about recreational drug use are a mess.

Americans rot in prison for using or selling marijuana, which is relatively harmless. They rot in prison for selling cocaine and heroin, which aren’t harmless but harm mainly heavy users, and which are less harmful than cigarette smoking, which is legal.

Recreational drugs are immensely profitable mainly because they are illegal. The profits tend to corrupt the underpaid staffs of police and other law enforcement agencies. Those law enforcement officials who aren’t taking bribes from drug kingpins choose, instead, to take the Constitutional rights of people who engage in personal drug use.

Can We Do Better?

The correct policy response to the widespread use of psychotropic drugs is not a simple issue. The two extremes of the debate over drug policy seem biased on one hand by ideology and on the other hand by psychology:

  • Libertarianism rejects any legal limitations on personal conduct. This view endorses repeal of all laws against manufacture, sale, or use of psychotropic drugs. Because of their ideology, libertarians minimize or ignore the harm that drug use can cause to users, to other people, and to society.
  • Social conservatism seems preoccupied by sin: in particular, by the sinful conduct of other people. This view supports extensive legal prohibition, iron-fisted enforcement, and merciless punishment of those perceived as sinners. Because of their psychology, social conservatives exaggerate the immorality of drug use and the harm it can cause to users, to other people, and to society.

History can also inform our assessment. It provides arguments for two propositions, each of which leads to a different conclusion about drug policy.

All societies forbid some drugs and approve others

All societies throughout history have used psychotropic drugs. As psychiatrist Thomas Szasz documents in his classic book Ceremonial Chemistry (Syracuse University Press, 2003), societies have considered some drugs to be wicked and have persecuted their use. Other drugs, often quite similar, were considered virtuous and their use was encouraged. Often, the same drugs appeared at different times in both categories. This suggests that classifying drugs as sinful or virtuous is irrational, as is persecution of drug use.

Political resistance to drug legalization tends to confirm the role of irrationality in the debate:

Legalization has been a politically weak but intellectually powerful influence in American life for the last decade. Its criticism of the current regime has a great deal of truth in it. … Arrayed against them, but with a curiously weak representation in the academic and intellectual community, are all the forces of political power.
(MacCoun and Reuter, Drug War Heresies, location 114 of ebook. Cambridge UP, 2001)

Henry David Thoreau wrote, accurately, that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” If using drugs helps people to endure life’s difficulties with a modicum of contentment, then that argues for letting them do it unmolested. Sigmund Freud held the same view of alcohol. Perhaps the most poignant argument for letting people use psychotropic drugs was given, in another context, by the American writer Mark Twain:

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain … But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend. When man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
(Letters from the Earth, Letter X)

People take psychotropic drugs to “set themselves free” of life’s inevitable sorrows and frustrations. One can argue that they shouldn’t have to die for it.

All societies have scapegoats

At the same time, all societies throughout history have seemed to need scapegoat groups toward which members of the majority direct the anger and frustration of their own lives. Sometimes the scapegoats are religious, sometimes ethnic, sometimes selected by particular practices such as the use of forbidden drugs.

A realistic assessment must consider the possibility that persecuting drug users acts as a social safety valve. Though it is an admitted evil, it might provide a less destructive and less expensive social catharsis than its alternatives, just as Edward Jenner discovered that deliberately infecting people with cowpox (by vaccination) protected them from the much more serious disease of smallpox.

This argues for continued drug prohibition, though the specifics – which drugs, how they are prohibited or discouraged, and what kind of penalties attend their use – make a great deal of difference.

The Libertarian View

The libertarian view has undeniable merits. Mindless drug prohibition does increase crime, both by inducing some users to commit crimes for money to buy drugs and by causing violent resolution of conflicts between people who lack access to the courts. It ruins the lives of people whose only crime is seeking a temporary, drug-induced escape from their problems. It degrades the rule of law and corrupts police.  Like earlier prohibition efforts, it disproportionately affects disfavored minorities. As Booker T. Washington wrote in 1912:

In the agitation of the liquor question incident to the attempt to pass prohibition laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other Southern States, a great deal was said about the relation of strong drink to crime, particularly crime among Negroes. This is a very important subject, because from two-thirds to three-fourths of prisoners in the penitentiaries, jails, and chain gangs in the South are Negroes.
(“Negro Crime and Strong Drink,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 3:3, September 1912, pp. 384-392)

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

However, the libertarian view is unrealistic because it assumes that people act rationally: a quality that they display inconsistently even under ideal conditions, and which drug use makes more difficult. It also assumes an atomistic view of society in which individuals’ actions do not significantly affect others and in which they have no obligations to others beyond non-aggression.

The Social Conservative View

Apart from its obsession with sin and punishment, the social conservative view is closer to the truth than the libertarian view. Doing nothing about widespread use of psychotropic drugs is not an option. However, what we do should be informed by three considerations:

  • All drugs are not alike. Drugs differ widely in the harm they cause to users, to other people, and to society.
  • All drug users are not alike. As with alcohol, the majority of drug users are casual and occasional users. Only a minority are habitual or addicted users.
  • All legal and social sanctions are not alike. They can range from mild (such as fines or social disapproval) to draconian (such as long prison sentences or execution of drug dealers).

What Should We Do?

Our goal is to minimize the harm that drug use and illegal trafficking cause to users, to other people, and to society. However, we want to avoid remedies that in themselves cause excessive harm, such as degrading the rule of law, violating individual rights, or inflicting disproportionately severe punishments for relatively minor transgressions.

Having concluded that “Yes, we are going to do something to regulate psychotropic drug use,” we can now address the question: What should we do?

Domestic and international anti-drug efforts are not mutually exclusive. It’s quite possible to take some measures that reduce drug production in source countries, and take other measures to regulate drug use domestically.

American anti-drug efforts in other drug-producing countries are not very cost-effective, though some are less unhelpful than others. As Kleiman, Caulkins, and Hawken observe in Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2011):

Interdiction has had greater success than crop eradication, which in turn is more likely than alternative development to disrupt availability in final-market countries.

However, they conclude:

[The desire] to get to the root of drug problems by stopping drug production in source countries … is based on the illusion that the drug problem is caused by the drugs – which can be seized and destroyed – rather than by the desire for those drugs and the industry that arises to meet that desire.

It is also true that many drugs can be grown or produced domestically, so attacking their production in other countries has little effect on their availability in the United States. It is also not irrelevant that the U.S. military is already over-extended and the U.S government budget is severely strained. Overall, anti-drug efforts in other countries are a poor choice.

That leaves domestic policy as a tool to reduce drug-related harm.

Thinking Outside the Box for Domestic Policy

Most discussions of drug policy ignore one important alternative. There is a way to reduce drug-related harm that falls between the extremes of doing nothing and doing too much. It’s unfashionable, largely unknown except as a rhetorical device, and little understood in the 21st century, but was a central feature of America’s Constitutional system: Federalism.

Federalism holds that power and decision-making should be decentralized as much as is practical. It holds that if an issue can be handled adequately at the local or state level, then it is not an appropriate concern of the national government.

Some issues are clearly federal concerns: basic civil rights, international commerce, war, crimes that cross state lines, and so forth. However, for both philosophical and practical reasons, many other issues are better left to state or local jurisdictions.

The premier example of such an issue is abortion. The 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, which launched our national frenzy about the issue, is usually misunderstood. It did not legalize abortion, which was already legal in some states and illegal in others. What Roe did (on dubious Constitutional grounds) was to strike down most state laws restricting abortion. That raised what had been a state and local issue to the federal level. From the standpoint of practical politics and social harmony, that change caused most of the problems.

Abortion is a bitterly divisive issue mainly because Americans cannot reach a national consensus on the correct legal solution. However, achieving consensus at the state or local level would be much easier. California, New York, and other majority-liberal states would probably have few if any restrictions. Illinois might have some restrictions on a procedure that was generally legal. Utah might ban abortion completely. On both sides of the debate, zealots would be dissatisfied, but the national acrimony about abortion would be over.

Likewise, a big part of the American problem with illegal drugs comes from the inability to achieve a national consensus. The division of opinion is not geographically divided as much as it is for abortion, but has a geographic component. Achieving consensus would be easier at the state or local level than at the national level, where it is virtually impossible.

A first step, then, would be for the federal government to cede most drug policy choices to the states. Based on majority opinion of its citizens, each state would enact drug policies best suited to its own situation.

What States Might Wisely Do

Of course, that still leaves unanswered the question of what states should do about the use of psychotropic drugs.

We must accept the fact that no solution will be perfect. Regardless of what we do, some people will abuse drugs. Some people will be killed by them. Some minors will get them.

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote that “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” By pursuing unattainable perfect solutions and refusing to consider attainable good solutions, U.S. drug policy has done enormous harm both to America and to other countries.

In summary, here are my recommended “good solutions:”

  • Marijuana and similar drugs: Ignore them except when their use causes other problems, such as driving while intoxicated. Treat them in essentially the same way as alcoholic beverages. Prohibit their sale to minors. They have low addiction potential and are relatively (though not completely) harmless. Most of the harm comes from enforcement efforts.
  • Cocaine, heroin, and similar drugs: Sell them through government dispensaries to addicts and incorrigible heavy users who cannot or will not quit using them. Include medical monitoring. After a speedy (and fair) trial, promptly execute anyone found guilty of selling cocaine or heroin on the black market. Such drugs have high addiction potential and can cause serious physical harm. Current enforcement efforts add to the damage through violence, corruption, and impure street drugs.

Executing cocaine and heroin dealers, while providing users with the drugs in a regulated way, would also preserve the function of drug sellers and users as social scapegoats. It would thereby decrease the likelihood of even more serious social and political pathology.

What the Federal Government Can Do

The federal government does have a role in discouraging the use of psychotropic drugs. It is limited but, over the long run, it might be more effective than enforcement efforts.

The most obvious role for the federal government is to prosecute interstate crimes that involve drugs, just as it now prosecutes crimes that would otherwise be local if one of the perpetrators hadn’t crossed a state line in committing them. The federal government can also adjudicate disputes between states about drug policy related issues.

However, what might be the federal government’s most powerful role has less immediate effect. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, two-time Nobel laureate, wrote:

Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the state … Any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be ‘frozen’ at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again.
(Unpopular Essays, Routledge Classics, 2009)

The federal government has enormous power to shape American public opinion, though in the case of drug policy, it has exercised that power either clumsily or not at all.

An example of successful propaganda is the government’s use of the entertainment industry to promote its military agenda.

Most Americans are unaware that the U.S. Department of Defense has “script approval” rights over the majority of American war movies. Consistent with the First Amendment, the government does not prohibit movies opposing U.S. military actions. However, in exchange for control over movie content, the Pentagon offers “free” use of military aircraft, locations, hardware, and other assistance. As a result, movies that portray government policies in the most positive light are cheaper and more realistic than movies opposing such policies. Most moviemakers decide to cooperate. Moviegoers never realize that they paid $11 a ticket to watch two hours of propaganda.

For the most part, Americans are subjected to the opposite kind of propaganda about the sale and use of psychotropic drugs. Popular movies such as “Savages” and television shows such as “Weeds” portray drug dealers in a mostly positive light, and portray drug use as mostly harmless. Others portray cocaine use as trendy and fashionable, much as popular 1960s television shows such as “Perry Mason” featured characters who smoked cigarettes almost non-stop throughout each episode.

The propaganda pendulum has now swung to the opposite extreme for cigarettes. As a result, smoking has become less popular and smokers are seen as social lepers. Movies and television shows must get special permission to show characters smoking cigarettes.

The same thing can happen with cocaine, heroin, and other drugs with high potential for harm. Along the same lines as its military propaganda, the federal government could offer incentives for entertainment providers to convey anti-drug messages. It would take time for Hollywood to accept and transmit the message, and more time for public attitudes to change. But changing public attitudes is the best, even if imperfect, thing that the federal government can try to do in drug policy.

In this world, there are no perfect solutions. But American drug policy ignores a lot of good ones.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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Posted by: N.S. Palmer | July 9, 2012

Is Widespread Unemployment a Blessing in Disguise?

By N.S. Palmer

An article in this morning’s New York Times observes that as technology has advanced, machines have replaced human workers in more and more fields.

Originally, automation meant mechanization of physical movements. In 19th century England, mechanized looms replaced skilled workers. The newly-unemployed workers formed the Luddite movement and smashed the mechanized looms.

Today, “Luddite” has a negative connotation, suggesting a person who mindlessly opposes technology. But the Luddites had a point. They had spent their lives developing high levels of skill in their fields. To be thrown out of their jobs and replaced by machines was a bitter blow. It was even more bitter because, having devoted themselves to a suddenly-obsolete craft, they had few prospects for any other employment.

We have modern-day Luddites but no Luddite movement. Since the 1970s, robotic technology has increasingly replaced human employees in manufacturing. Retail stores now have “automated self-checkout” lanes that invite shoppers to ring up their own purchases, eliminating the need for human cashiers.

White-collar workers aren’t safe, either. Computerized databases eliminate the need for most file clerks. Automated speech recognition eliminates the need for human telephone representatives. Legal software eliminates the need for lawyers in routine issues. Even X-ray and electrocardiogram interpretation, previously done by medical school graduates with additional specialized training, is now done by computers.

The one job that computers haven’t yet replaced is the job of collecting the profits from eliminating all those other jobs. David Koch, Mitt Romney, and Jamie Dimon are probably safe for the moment. Oh, joy.

Decades ago, science fiction writers envisioned a future in which automation eliminated the need for most human work. Most people were freed from the need to spend most of their time earning a living. Instead, they could engage in study, leisure, civic activities, or self-improvement. But those stories presumed that people would have the means to do so. They didn’t need to worry about “making the rent.”

I don’t know if it’s time to think about decoupling a basic level of income from having a job, but maybe it is. Of course, that would require raising taxes on the super-rich, who would scream about socialism. And it would offend the sensibilities of many people who equate work with virtue.

But all work is not the same. In his book The Time of Our Lives (sadly, out of print), philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote about two kinds of work: subsistence work and leisure work.

Subsistence work is what you do merely to earn a living. Let’s be honest: no matter how much most of us like our jobs, we might not do them if we didn’t need the money. That’s subsistence work.

But there’s also leisure work, which you do for recreation or self-improvement: taking classes, reading books, and so on. That’s real work, but it’s work that we choose, for the purpose of improving ourselves or enhancing our lives. It has little in common with, as Peter Gibbons remarked, sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen or obsessing about cover sheets on TPS reports.

Perhaps automation has forced our hand on the issue. Maybe it’s time to consider economic and social changes that would make it possible for more people to devote themselves to leisure work. One idea, floated in the 1970s by conservative Republican President Richard M. Nixon, was a guaranteed annual income for all citizens.

Another option would be a return to the attitude that prevailed in the United States until the 1980s: That businesses had a responsibility not only to their owners, but to their employees and to society at large.

The purpose of an economic system is not to maximize the wealth and power of people at the top, but to provide at least a decent living standard for as many people as possible. That includes decent jobs for people who need them, even if those jobs could be done more cheaply by automation or by nine-year-old children in Asian sweatshops.

When I was in college, I worked one summer as a busboy in a restaurant at the local Hilton hotel. During winter break from school, I needed some extra money, so I called up the hotel’s personnel office to ask if they had anything for me to do. They put me and another student to work picketing the hotel for a publicity stunt. They didn’t have to do it, but I was “part of the family.” They gave me a job for a few days so that I’d have some cash.

Likewise, until the late 1960s, elevator operators were common in large office buildings. The operators pushed buttons that people taking the elevators could easily have pushed for themselves: a very young Shirley Maclaine played an elevator operator in her movie “The Apartment.” Also until the 1960s, gas stations commonly employed attendants who pumped your gas and checked your oil and tire pressure.

It’s cheaper to do without those jobs. If the only responsibility of business is to make the most money for its owners, then it makes sense to eliminate them — and the people who depend on them. But if business has a wider responsibility to contribute to society, or if it has obligations to its employees as well as to its owners, then it makes sense to have jobs like that.

I don’t have the answers. But I know that we can’t continue on the same path we’ve been following. Society will explode beyond the ability of even the most oppressive totalitarian regime to contain it. I suspect that anticipation of such an explosion is one reason the U.S. government incessantly trumpets its “terrorist” bogeyman to justify eliminating Americans’ privacy and Constitutional rights.

We have to make some changes, or change will force itself upon us. If the latter happens, it will be much more unpleasant for everyone, including Wall Street’s self-styled “masters of the universe.”

Postscript: It’s worth adding that most current unemployment in Western economies is not caused by technology, but by inadequate demand. That is a short-term problem that is much easier to remedy if the political will is there to do it.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

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