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On Monday I posted a Big Think piece on sexual addiction, so today I offer up a Buddhist take on sexual addiction from The 12-Step Buddhist (an excellent site if you haven't already checked it out).
Episode 006 - the 12-Step Buddhist Podcast: Sex Addiction is a Brain Disease January 3rd, 2009

Click here to play:

Format: 128kbps MP3
Time: 44:31

Tags: Buddhism on Sexual Addiction, Buddhism, addiction, sexuality, 12-Step Buddhist, podcast

[image source]

I found this interesting philosophy article by accident. Quodlibet Journal seems to be quite Christian in its approach, but still interesting:
Quodlibet Online Journal of Christian Theology and Philosophy is published quarterly, in January, April, July, October, by the Society of Online Christian Theology and Philosophy (SOCTP). Annual subscription and access to all published articles is free.

Quodlibet Online Journal of Christian Theology and Philosophy is designed primarily for articles which address theological and philosophical issues from a Christian perspective, and for articles from any perspective which deal critically with the theological and philosophical credentials of the Christian faith. The journal welcomes submissions in all areas of theology and philosophy, from those who do as well as those who do not share its Christian commitment. This article looks at religious belief within the context of epistemology.
On the Epistemological Status of Belief --> Author: Scott David Foutz Scott David Foutz on December 11, 2008 4:44 PM --> Vote 0 Votes -->

prologue

This paper aims at setting forth a perspective on religious epistemology. As will hopefully become clear through the course of this essay, I understand accurate discussion of issues pertaining to religious epistemology, or more specifically of an epistemology of belief, as necessarily grounded in general epistemology. Thus this essay will begin with a discussion of general epistemology in order to set a foundation for its discussion of belief.

It may be the case that the need for such a dependency is obvious and uninsightful. Highlighting this relation between belief ideas and knowledge ideas does, however, set an initial boundary as to the scope of this paper by suggesting a central argument (namely, that beliefs are grounded in knowledge) which itself will require the support of careful discussions of general and religious epistemologies. It will also become evident that based on the epistemology outlined here, certain theories of general and religious epistemology are precluded. By the conclusion of this essay I hope to have laid out a very specific position on these matters which is both consistent and arguably plausible.

existential and abstract ideas

One should probably begin this discussion of epistemology with an explanation of what is meant in the use of the term "idea". When such an explanation is attempted, however, an immediate need for a distinction presents itself, a distinction between what we will call "ideation" and the idea itself. By ideation I mean the process through which the particular idea is derived. I will turn to ideation in more detail shortly. For purposes of this discussion, by idea I mean to emphasize the notion of content, that cognitive representation of what exists outside the mind. This narrow definition of ideas as those representations of things existing outside the mind would seem to neglect entire categories of "ideas" which we realize do not correspond to reality or at least to actual states of affairs. Such categories would include the fantastic (ideas of unicorns and centaurs, for example), the hypothetical, remembrances, and possible others. However, this narrow definition of idea, as we will see, will provide a very adequate means of accounting for these secondary categories.

More precisely, I would like to distinguish between what we may call existential and abstract ideas. Existential ideas are those which occur (through ideation) from encounters with actual particulars, things which exist, and thus such ideas are consistent with the narrow definition suggested above. Historically, this category of ideas has gone by the names simple (John Locke), intuitive (William Occam), atomistic (Wittgenstein), and others. I prefer the name existential to these others since it provides at least initial reference to what the idea (representationally) consists of and from what it is derived, namely, existents. The existential idea, in addition to containing the collection of perceptions of the existent's various attributes, also carries with it the indelible conviction that 'this exists'. Whether such existence belongs properly to the existent's attributes I will not here discuss. It would seem, however, that one's conviction of the existence of an object does not take place in the same manner one's conviction, for example, that the object is red, since we have no perceptual organ specifically designed to perceive existence. While it could be argued based on this difference that one's notion of the object's existence might more properly fall within the category of abstract ideas (for reasons which will become clear), and thus the term 'existential idea' used in the manner I intend is from the offset problematic, at present I maintain my preference for the term for its explanatory value.

One inevitably encounters numerous existential ideas throughout the course of each day, as a myriad of objects are confronted and perceived. Each subject, then, has a wealth of such existential ideas through his or her life experience. These core ideas serve as the basis for rationation wherein the rational capacity of the subject is able to manipulate or further investigate the content of the existential ideas. Those subsequent ideas resulting from such rationation I designate abstract ideas. This designation points to the fact that the content of such ideas ground in abstractions of the more basic existential ideas. Abstraction itself is not a single process, but is possible through several operations of the mind. John Locke (Essay, I.x-xi) lists the following faculties of the mind: retention, memory, discerning, distinguishing (as to clarity and determinateness), comparing, compounding, naming, and abstraction ("whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives for all of the same kind"). All of these functions of rationation involve a manipulation of or extrapolation from existential or simple ideas.

Such abstraction results in the more commonly recognized variety of ideas alluded to earlier. Using Locke's terms, we see that ideas of unicorns, centaurs, and other fantastic things result from the compounding or combination of existential ideas. Remembrances or memories result from the mind' ability to retain and recall such existential ideas. And, as we will see, hypothetical ideas are possible through our comparison of existential ideas and experiences.

I have categorized ideas into two broad categories, existential and abstract. Existential ideas derive through encounter with existents and serve as the foundation for all other types of ideas. The abstract category contains these other types of ideas, all of which share the characteristic of deriving from a form of rationation of existential ideas. This categorization has left some important questions unanswered, many of which we cannot address in this paper. For example, how existential ideas actually emerge from such encounters is one such question. Here one's stance on empiricism, a priori ideas, and universals would become quite clear. A related question is how one might be sure his or her existential ideas actually correspond to actual states of affairs. In answering this second question a precise definition of knowledge would emerge and the problem of skepticism would be dealt with. Other questions which will be addressed involve notions my system apparently precludes or would seem to given fuller exposition, notions such as a priori knowledge or truths of reason. Before such answers are attempted, though, we must briefly turn to the topic of belief.

Go read the rest of this lengthy article.


Tags: Scott David Foutz, On the Epistemological Status of Belief, epistemology, Quodlibet Online Journal, Christian Theology and Philosophy, Philosophy, Religion, belief

This was posted in Harper's a couple of weeks ago - I love Rumi!
Rumi’s Parable of the Three FishAn illustration taken from a mid-fifteenth century Ottoman copy
of the Five Principles (Kelileh va demneh) with text in Farsi.
This is the story of the lake and the three big fish
that were in it, one of them intelligent,
another half-intelligent,
and the third, stupid.

Some fishermen came to the edge of the lake
with their nets. The three fish saw them.

The intelligent fish decided at once to leave,
to make the long, difficult trip to the ocean.

He thought,
"I won't consult with these two on this
They will only weaken my resolve, because they love
this place so. They call it home. Their ignorance
will keep them here."

When you're traveling, ask a traveler for advice,
not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.

Muhammad says,
"Love of one's country
is part of the faith."
But don't take that literally!
Your real "country" is where your heading.
not where you are.
Don't misread that hadith.

In the ritual ablutions, according to tradition,
there's a separate prayer for each body part.
when you snuff water up your nose to cleanse it,
beg for the scent of the spirit. The proper prayer is,
"Lord, wash with me. My hand has washed this part of me,
but my hand can't wash my spirit.
I can wash this skin, but you must wash me.

A certain man used to say the wrong prayer
for the wrong hole. He'd say the nose-prayer
when he splashed his behind. Can the odor of heaven
come from our rumps? Don't be humble with fools.
Don't take pride into the presence of a master.

It's right to love your home place, but first ask,
"Where is that, really?"

The wise fish saw the men and their nets and said,
"I'm leaving."

Ali was told a secret doctrine by Muhammad
and told not to tell it, so he whispered it down
the mouth of a well. Sometimes there's no one to talk to.
You must just set out on your own.

So the intelligent fish made its whole length
a moving footprint and, like a deer the dogs chase,
suffered greatly on its way, but finally made it
to the edgeless safety of the sea.

The half-intelligent fish thought,
"My guide
has gone. I ought to have gone with him,
but I didn't, and now I've lost my chance
to escape.
I wish I'd gone with him."
Don't regret what's happened. If it's in the past,
let it go. Don't even remember it!

A certain man caught a bird in a trap.
The bird says, "Sir, you have eaten many cows and sheep
in your life, and you're still hungry. The little bit
of meat in my bones won't satisfy you either.
If you let me go, I'll give you three pieces of wisdom
One I'll say standing on your hand. One on your roof.
And one I'll speak from the limb of that tree."

The man was interested. He freed the bird and let it stand
on his hand.
"Number One: Do not believe an absurdity,
no matter who says it."

The bird flew and lit on the man's roof. "Number Two:
Do not grieve over what is past. It's over.
Never regret what has happened."

"By the way," the bird continued, "in my body there's a huge
pearl weighing as much as ten copper coins. It was meant
to be the inheritance of you and your children,
but now you've lost it. You could have owned
the largest pearl in existence, but evidently
it was not meant to be."

The man started wailing like a woman in childbirth.
The bird: "Didn't I just say, Don't grieve
for what's in the past? And also, Don't believe
an absurdity? My entire body doesn't weigh
as much as ten copper coins. How could I have
a pearl that heavy inside me?"

The man came to his senses. "All right.
Tell me Number Three."

"Yes. You've made such good use of the first two!"
Don't give advice to someone who's groggy
and failing asleep. Don't throw seeds on the sand.
Some torn places cannot be patched.

Back to the second fish,
the half-intelligent one.
He mourns the absence of his guide for a while,
and then thinks, "What can I do to save myself
from these men and their nets? Perhaps if I pretend
to be already dead!
I'll be belly up on the surface
and float like weeds float, just giving myself totally
to the water. To die before I die, as Muhammad
said to."
So he did that.

He bobbed up and down, helpless,
within arm's reach of the fisherman.

"Look at this! The best and biggest fish
is dead."
One of the men lifted him by the tail,
spat on him, and threw him up on the ground.

He rolled over and over and slid secretly near
the water, and then, back in.

Meanwhile,
the third fish, the dumb one, was agitatedly
jumping about, trying to escape with his agility
and cleverness.
The net, of course, finally closed
around him, and as he lay in the terrible
frying-pan bed, he thought,
"If I get out of this,
I'll never live again in the limits of a lake.
Next time, the ocean! I'll make
the infinite my home."

–Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi) (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), Masnavi-ye Manavi (مثنوی معنوی), iv, 2203-86 (ca. 1265) (Coleman Barks transl.) from: The Essential Rumi

This is a story, as Rumi tells us in the prelude (in a passage that Coleman Barks decided not to include in his admirable translation), taken from the Sanskritic Five Principles or Panchatantra (पञ्चतन्त्र) from the third century BCE, a work which sets forth principles for the governance of a small state through a series of tales in which animals are introduced to present different aspects of the human nature. The book has been called a sort of Machiavelli of Indian antiquity by one of its scholars, since its purpose was apparently to teach young princelings in waiting the essential arts of statecraft. The Panchatantra was brought into Persia shortly before the age of Rumi, was translated and accommodated to Islamic ideas and values in some respects, and established itself as an instant classic. In his recounting, Rumi has adapted the fifteenth story from the first book of Kelileh va demneh, the name by which the book goes in Farsi, but he remains faithful to the essential political message of the original.

The major theme of this story is love of home, or patriotism, and its use and abuse by leaders. The story unfolds through the fate of three fish, one wise, one half-wise and the third a fool. (Barks uses the word “intelligent” instead of wise, which is arguable, but not perhaps the best translation.) Rumi does not challenge the notion that one should love his home, but he challenges us to ask, “Where is that actually?”

The foolish fish understands that the lake in which he was spawned and now lives is his home. He comes to the realization that this vision was false, but only too late, as he sits uncomfortably in a frying pan, about to be the meal of the men who have caught him. The foolish fish is bounded by the world of his immediate perceptions and needs. He lacks vision and foresight.

The half-wise fish is far more cunning in avoiding the traps and nets that the fishermen lay before him, so he escapes. But he is incapable of solving the riddle for himself. He needs a guide, which he recognizes is the wise fish. But the wise fish has set busily about saving himself and is gone. The half-wise fish is able enough, but he also is by his nature a follower who requires the guidance or intermediation of a greater one.

The wise fish recognizes that his true home is not the lake in which he has lived his life up to that point, but the boundless and infinite sea of which he has heard, but which he has never seen. The wise fish commits himself therefore to the quest for that true home, and he uses his skills and cunning to achieve that quest. He suffers and endures in the process, and achieves his goal.

Rumi warns us against those leaders who turn humans against humans with appeals to patriotism and love of home. Only a fool will allow this love, which is understandable and natural, to be transformed into hatred of others he does not know. In this way, he becomes the slave of the schemes and machinations of a nature which is clever but also base. Hence the first warning: Do not believe an absurdity, no matter who says it. These absurdities may and often do roll from the lips of persons set in authority above their fellow men. But those who preach hatred, distrust and hostility against other peoples do not merit our trust. They try to ensnare the feeble-minded with their bile. The foolish fish are their prey and they may capture some of the half-wise as well.

The fish, of course, represent human beings at different stages of awareness. (”The men of God are like fishes in the ocean,” Rumi writes elsewhere, “they pop up into view on the surface here and there and everywhere, as they please.”) But what, then is home? First, Rumi condemns as a fool the man who would define his home in terms of a political creation, be it city, state or empire. The true home is a boundless ocean, he writes. Man must think in terms of his species, linked across time and space. Equally he must cherish the planet on which he dwells and must avoid through love for any locality doing harm to the whole. But finally that “home” is something which the wiseman seeks, accepting suffering and loss as he does so. The way home, as Novalis would tell us, is an inward path.

To all my readers, a happy New Year filled with promise and hope, together with the resignation to bear the burdens that we must to achieve our goals, as each of us defines them. 2009 awaits us, offering new challenges, new obstacles and new prizes to be won. May each of you follow the way of that wise fish, avoid the traps that are placed in your way, detect the nets and swim around them, and ultimately make your way to that boundless ocean.

Tags: humanity, Spirituality, consciousness, Rumi, Parable of the Three Fish, Harper's, patriotism, Coleman Barks, Essential Rumi

The Guardian UK reviews a book that suggests kindness is no longer in vogue. Maybe it's an UK thing, but I don't see that so much here. People seem to be as kind as ever, which is to say not so much in general, but quite so in specific situations. Does that make sense? Try it this way - people don't seem to be that kind as a whole, but one on one they do seem to be generous and kind.

I wonder if the issue is a sense that kindness makes us vulnerable to being hurt or taken advantage of? Anyway, here's the review/article. Love thy neighbour Kindness has gone out of fashion. In the age of the rampant free market and the selfish gene, compassion is seen as either narcissism or weakness. So why have we become so suspicious of one of our most basic - and pleasurable - human qualities, ask Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

• Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
• The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009
• Article history

St Lawrence distributing alms: fresco by Fra Angelico (1447-1449) Photograph: /Corbis

Kindness was mankind's "greatest delight", the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species - apparently unlike other species of animal - we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness.

On Kindness
by Adam Philips & Barbara Taylor
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

Kindness - not sexuality, not violence, not money - has become our forbidden pleasure. In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else's shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness - like all the greatest human pleasures - are inherently perilous, they are none the less some of the most satisfying we possess.

In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: "He has forgotten the movements of his heart."

For nearly all of human history - up to and beyond Hume's day, the so-called dawn of modernity - people have perceived themselves as naturally kind. In giving up on kindness - and especially our own acts of kindness - we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.

Kindness's original meaning of kinship or sameness has stretched over time to encompass sentiments that today go by a wide variety of names - sympathy, generosity, altruism, benevolence, humanity, compassion, pity, empathy - and that in the past were known by other terms as well, notably philanthropia (love of mankind) and caritas (neighbourly or brotherly love). The precise meanings of these words vary, but basically they all denote what the Victorians called "open-heartedness", the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other. "No less indiscriminate and general than the alienation between people is the desire to breach it," the German critic Theodor Adorno once wrote, suggesting that even though our alienation, our distance from other people, may make us feel safe it also makes us sorry, as though loneliness is the inevitable cost of looking after ourselves. History shows us the manifold expressions of humanity's desire to connect, from classical celebrations of friendship, to Christian teachings on love and charity, to 20th-century philosophies of social welfare. It also shows us the degree of human alienation, how our capacity to care for each other is inhibited by fears and rivalries with pedigrees as long as kindness itself.

For most of western history the dominant tradition of kindness has been Christianity, which sacralises people's generous instincts and makes them the basis of a universalist faith. For centuries, Christian caritas functioned as a cultural cement, binding individuals into society. But from the 16th century the Christian rule "love thy neighbour as thyself" came under increasing attack from competitive individualism. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) - the ur-text of the new individualism - dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity. Men, Hobbes insisted, were selfish beasts who cared for nothing but their own well-being; human existence was a "warre of alle against alle". His arguments were slow to gain ground, but by the end of the 18th century - despite the best efforts of Hume and others - they were becoming orthodoxy. Two centuries later it seems we are all Hobbesians, convinced that self-interest is our ruling principle. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction "love thy neighbour as thyself" must be ironic because people hate themselves.) Kindly behaviour is looked upon with suspicion; public espousals of kindness are dismissed as moralistic and sentimental. Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness - Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa - are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritising the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal.

Today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned and indeed obligatory. Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. None the less, we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalisations to justify our avoidance.

All compassion is self-pity, DH Lawrence remarked, and this usefully formulates the widespread modern suspicion of kindness: that it is either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative) or the lowest form of weakness (kindness is the way the weak control the strong, the kind are kind only because they haven't got the guts to be anything else). If we think of humans as essentially competitive, and therefore triumphalist by inclination, as we are encouraged to do, then kindness looks distinctly old-fashioned, indeed nostalgic, a vestige from a time when we could recognise ourselves in each other, and feel sympathetic because of our kindness - if such a time ever existed. And what, after all, can kindness help us win, except moral approval; or possibly not even that, in a society where "respect" for personal status has become a leading value.

Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers. But agreeing to talk about winners and losers is part and parcel of the phobic avoidance, the contemporary terror, of kindness. Because one of the things the enemies of kindness never ask themselves - and this is now an enemy within all of us - is why we feel it at all. Why are we ever, in any way, moved to be kind to other people, not to mention to ourselves? Why does kindness matter to us? It is, perhaps, one of the distinctive things about kindness - unlike an abstract moral ideal such as justice - that in the end we know exactly what it is, in most everyday situations; and yet our knowing what the kind act is makes it easier to avoid. We usually know what the kind thing to do is - and when a kindness is done to us, and when it is not. We usually have the wherewithal to do it (kindness is not an expert skill); and it gives us pleasure. And yet we are extremely disturbed by it. There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.

"A sign of health in the mind", Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970, "is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us." To live well, we must be able to identify imaginatively with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.

Modern western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.

But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics - those avatars of self-reliance - recognised man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness. "Individualism" is a very recent phenomenon. The Enlightenment, generally perceived as the origin of western individualism, promoted "social affections" against "private interests". Victorianism, individualism's so-called golden age, witnessed a fierce clash between champions and critics of commercial individualism. In the early 1880s the historian and Christian activist Arnold Toynbee, in a series of lectures to working men on the English industrial revolution, tore into the egoistic vision of man preached by prophets of free-enterprise capitalism. The "world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection" envisaged by free marketeers was "less real than the island of Lilliput", Toynbee snorted. American transcendentalists of the same period attacked the spirit of "selfish competition", and established communities of "brotherly cooperation". Even Charles Darwin, that darling of modern individualists, strongly rejected the view of mankind as primarily selfish, arguing for the existence of other-regarding instincts as powerful as self-regarding ones. Sympathy and cooperation were innate to man, Darwin argued in the The Descent of Man (1871), and a key factor behind humanity's evolutionary success.

Darwin championed kindness on scientific rather than religious grounds. For most Victorians, however, Christian caritas remained the epitome of kindness. Serving God meant serving one's fellows, through the vast array of philanthropic agencies sponsored by the churches. Secular individuals and organisations absorbed this ethos, with professional bodies emphasising the altruistic motives of their members while politicians paraded their public-spiritedness. In Britain, self-sacrifice and social duty became keynotes of the "imperial mission", attracting hordes of high-minded men and women prepared to shoulder the "white man's burden". Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, an army of philanthropists descended on poor Americans, determined to elevate their morals while alleviating their hardships. Power suffused with kindly purpose became a militant practical force, moulding social relations domestically and globally.

Today Victorian kindness is condemned for its moral self-righteousness, its class biases, its racial-imperial mentality. Nietzsche's sneer at 19th-century philanthropists as persons of "bad conscience" is widely endorsed. Nor did these good Samaritans lack critics at the time - from Oscar Wilde, with his well-publicised loathing of the "sickly cant of Duty", to radicals and socialists determined to replace charity with justice, elite kindness with universal rights. The horrors of the first world war exposed the hollowness of imperial-sacrificial rhetoric, while the erosion of traditional social hierarchies following the war undermined the service ideal. Women who had long touted self-forgetfulness and dedication to others as "female duty" began to contemplate the benefits of equality instead. Perhaps women were not always bound to care for others more than themselves? "Poor-peopling", as Florence Nightingale dubbed women's philanthropic labours in slum neighbourhoods, began to fall from fashion, and many welcomed its passing, looking instead to trade unions and government to eradicate poverty rather than softening it. By the early 20th century, "good works" had lost their moral glow.

Kindness aligned to power degenerates easily into moralistic bullying - as many recipients of present-day welfare services know to their cost. William Beveridge, the architect of the British welfare state, was acutely aware of this danger. Entering public life in the twilight years of Victorian philanthropy, Beveridge repudiated what he described as the "doing things for other people" spirit of organised charity, announcing his intention to approach social problems scientifically rather than sentimentally. "I utterly distrust the saving power of culture and missions and isolated good feelings ..." All human action was ultimately selfish, he declared. However, this was not a viewpoint that Beveridge - passionately committed to the relief of suffering - could maintain for long. His 1942 report, laying out the principles of cradle-to-grave welfare provision, was hailed by admirers as "practical benevolence". He began political life as a Liberal, and ended it as a socialist committed to the altruistic values he had earlier dismissed, eulogising the "spirit of social conscience" as the foundation stone of a good society. "The happiness or unhappiness of the society in which we live depends upon ourselves as citizens."

The kindness that Beveridge favoured was determinedly modern and demotic, caritas without the condescending coerciveness of Victorian philanthropy. For his friend and brother-in-law, the Christian socialist Richard Tawney, kindness of this order required equality. Inequalities - of wealth, privilege, opportunity - were inimical to fellow feeling. The "religion of inequality" worshipped in Britain, Tawney wrote in 1931, "vulgarised" and "depressed" all human relations. His sentiments strongly influenced the labour movement, undermining free-market ideology and bolstering support for welfare principles.

The present-day NHS is in many respects an archaism, a dinosaur of public altruism that stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Strenuous attempts by succeeding governments to commercialise it have done much damage, yet the caring ethos survives, testimony to what Richard Titmuss, one of the NHS's most influential champions, described as the universal human impulse to "help strangers". Why should anyone care whether a person entirely unknown to them gets the healthcare he or she needs? On the Hobbesian model of human nature this makes no sense at all; yet the evidence that people do care, Titmuss believed, is overwhelming.

Margaret Thatcher's 1979 electoral victory marked the defeat in Britain of the Beveridge/Tawney/Titmuss vision of a kindly society, while the rise of Reaganism in 80s America saw a similar erosion of welfare values there. Kindness was downgraded into a minority motivation, suitable only for parents (especially mothers), "care professionals" and assorted sandal-wearing do-gooders. The "caring, sharing" 90s proclaimed a return to community values, but this proved to be rhetorical flimflam as Thatcher and Reagan's children came of age, steeped in free-market ideology and with barely a folk memory of the mid-century welfare vision. With the 1997 triumph of New Labour in Britain, and George W Bush's election to the American presidency in 2000, competitive individualism became the ruling consensus. The taboo surrounding "dependency" became even stronger, as politicians, employers and a motley array of well-fed moralists harangued the poor and vulnerable on the virtues of self-reliance. Tony Blair called for "compassion with a hard edge" to replace the softening variety advocated by his predecessors. "The new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency," he declared, as a plague of cost-cutting managers chomped away at Britain's social services.

Capitalism is no system for the kind-hearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial. Untrammelled free enterprise generates wealth and happiness for all. Like all utopian faiths, this is largely delusory. Free markets erode the societies that harbour them. The great paradox of modern capitalism, the ex-Thatcherite John Gray has pointed out (False Dawn, 1998), is that it undermines the very social institutions on which it once relied - family, career, community. For increasing numbers of Britons and Americans, the "enterprise culture" means a life of overwork, anxiety and isolation. Competition reigns supreme, with even small children forced to compete against each other and falling ill as a result. A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness. Kindness comes naturally to us, but so too do cruelty and aggression. People placed under unremitting pressure become estranged from each other. Like the bullied child who bullies others in turn, individuals coerced by circumstances become coercers. Sympathies contract as open-heartedness begins to feel too exposed. Paranoia blossoms as people seek scapegoats for their unhappiness. Such scapegoating is a self-betrayal because it involves sacrificing our kindness. But this is a price many pay when tribal loyalties, sometimes vicious in their expression, replace wider communal bonds. A culture of "hardness" and cynicism grows, fed by envious admiration of those who seem to thrive - the rich and famous, our modern priesthood - in this tooth-and-claw environment.

What is to be done?

Read the rest of the review.


Tags: On Kindness, Adam Philips, Barbara Taylor, books, Guardian UK, kindness, culture, England, forbidden pleasure, vulnerability

Author Rachel Resnick explains the ways repression can lead to dangerous addictions. She makes good arguments, I think, and I only see it getting worse. My girlfriend sees this all day where she works, especially the comorbidity of love and sex addictions (love junkies become sex addicts because the two are equated for many people).




Tags: Big Think, Does America Have a Sex Addiction?, Psychology, addiction, culture, sexuality, Rachel Resnick

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This article from The Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education) takes a look at the influence (finally) of genetics on sociology, which moves everything a little closer to integral (small, glacial increments, but things are shifting). It's all interconnected.

Of course, the risk is that genetics will do to sociology what neuroscience is doing to psychology - remove the human component and make it all about flatland, objective science.
The Nature-Nurture Debate, Redux

Genetic research finally makes its way into the thinking of sociologists

By CHRISTOPHER SHEA

If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?

Some in the discipline are telling their peers just that. With study after study finding that all sorts of personal characteristics are heritable — along with behaviors shaped by those characteristics — a see-no-gene perspective is obsolete.

Nor, these scholars argue, is it reasonable to concede that genes play some role but then to loftily assert that geneticists and the media overstate that role and to go on conducting studies as if genes did not exist. How, exactly, do genes shape human lives, interact with environmental forces, or get overpowered by those forces? "We do ourselves a disservice if we don't engage in those arguments," says Jason Schnittker, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "If we stay on the ropes, people from a different perspective, with a more extreme view, will be making them."

Schnittker is among the contributors to a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology, the field's flagship publication, devoted to "Genetics and Social Structure" — evidence that at least some sociologists are attempting to reckon with the genetic revolution. And not just in the AJS. Other top sociology journals, too, are publishing work incorporating genetic perspectives: The American Sociological Review in August published a much-discussed article on genes and delinquency by Guang Guo, of the University of North Carolina. (A couple of years ago, in an early foray on this front, Guo co-edited a special section of another top journal, Social Forces, titled "The Linking of Sociology and Biology.")

It is even possible to identify sociology departments in which gene-environment interactions amount to a subfield: Chapel Hill, for one. Its department boasts at least five tenured scholars who write on the subject, and it offers a graduate seminar on genes and society.

The idea for the special issue of AJS was hatched a couple of years ago at Columbia University, under the aegis of that campus's Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program. Its fellows are encouraged to reach across disciplinary lines, and Peter Bearman, who co-directs the Columbia program, found that he and two young visiting fellows, Brandeis's Sara Shostak and Penn State's Molly Martin, shared an interest in responding to the flood of new information about heredity. The three sociologists ended up editing the special issue.

"There was a sense," Bearman says, "that there were two modes of thoughts about genetics and health. One was, 'Genetics causes everything.' Another was a refusal to think that anything related to genetic expression was worth studying.

"My view then, and my view now is that the embrace of genetic explanation and fear of genetic explanation were really the same phenomenon: an overemphasis on the role of genetics in shaping health outcomes." In short, sociologists may shun genes because they secretly fear that genes are more powerful than they actually are.

To concede that some people are genetically encoded to have shorter fuses than others or are more likely to gain weight if granted unlimited access to Oreos is hardly to embrace a view of humans as lumbering robots ruled by genes, contributors to the AJS issue argue. Admitting as much is just the first step in a rich inquiry into the biological and social forces shaping human lives — an inquiry that sociologists, like few others, are equipped to make.

But even the most gung-ho genetically minded sociologists will say that their first baby steps toward consilience, E.O. Wilson's term for the uniting of the biological and social sciences, don't match that lofty rhetoric. In general the genetic sociological work is highly statistical, often involving relatively new multivariable techniques. It is devoid of the narrative description that sociologists who immerse themselves in their subjects' lives can offer.

What has the work uncovered? In the AJS special issue, Schnittker rebuts the "set point" theory of happiness that has been espoused by some psychologists: the notion that there's not much we can do about our innate levels of jubilance or melancholy. He makes use of a data set of people ages 25 to 75, including fraternal twins, identical twins, and nontwin siblings (looking at twins and nontwins helps isolate heritable characteristics), and finds that the environment does, in fact, matter — but in unpredictable ways. Marriage, he finds, has almost no effect on adult contentment once other factors have been accounted for. Friendships, on the other hand, matter a great deal — a reversal of sociologists' usual ordering of these two sources of support. The explanation may be that we marry people who are much like us, while friendships are more random and labile, and thus more likely to bump us out of our habitual moods.

North Carolina's Guo looks at a gene that has been tied to levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to aggressiveness and sexual energy. One variant of the gene, which may tamp down dopamine levels, has a "robust protective effect" against early first-time sex among teenagers, he finds. The protective effect vanishes, however, when teenagers with that genotype find themselves in schools where early sex is the norm. Meanwhile, Bernice Pescosolido, of Indiana University at Bloomington — who, like Guo, has several co-authors — finds that a version of the gene Gabra2, implicated by other researchers in an increased risk for alcoholism, has no effect on women. Even among men, those with the risky version have no increased risk for alcoholism provided they have strong family bonds.

The idea that social theorists must account for genes sounds commonsensical. But those doing the work, of course, labor under some dark shadows. Social science has a history of misguided, or worse, attempts to link genes to crime, or to deviance, or to IQ; racial differences have often been either a subtext of this work or the researchers' main interest. Take your pick of flare-ups over the past 30 years: the reception of Crime and Human Nature (1985), written by the UCLA political scientist James Q. Wilson and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein; comments, in 1992, by a National Institutes of Health official comparing inner cities to jungles and arguing that the breakdown of "social controls" in ghettos allowed genetic impulses to run free; a conference on crime and genes scheduled for 1992 and canceled after an uproar. (It was finally held in 1995.) Then, of course, there was the furor over The Bell Curve, in which Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles A. Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, attributed social problems among racial minorities in part to low intelligence.

Sociologists spoke up during those controversies, but they have also criticized less obviously combustible genetic studies. Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.

Duster recalled sitting on various governmental review boards and watching as what he considered an inordinate amount of money flowed toward geneticists and other scientists who studied maladies like alcoholism. Why spend millions searching for a predisposition to alcoholism among Native Americans, he asked, when their mistreatment and oppression offered explanation enough?

In an interview, Duster mostly affirms those remarks. "While in theory, one should embrace this theory of environmental-genetic research," he says, "in actual practice, unless one is very, very sensitive to the stratification of the sciences, the table will be tilted in favor of genetics."

Jeremy Freese, of Northwestern University, frames his contribution to the AJS special issue as a direct rebuttal of Duster. An oppositional stance makes sense "for some highly charged areas," Freese grants, but it can't be the whole agenda. He brandishes a list of 52 characteristics that have been found to be partially heritable: cognitive ability, extroversion, aggressiveness, likeliness to marry, age at first sexual intercourse, support for the death penalty, and on and on. Indeed, by now one should assume that "genetic differences are partial causes of the overwhelming majority of outcomes" that sociologists study. Nevertheless, he says, social scientists still engage in "tacit collusion" to ignore the role of genetic differences.

Nothing makes it easier on "imperializing" fields that already disrespect sociology, Freese writes — he mentions economics and behavioral genetics — "than an incisive, significant, and easily explained flaw shared by an entire literature."

Ouch. Well, not an entire literature, not anymore. What has led to the new genetic turn in sociology, at least among a minority? In part it has to do with the availability of important new data sets. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, aka Add Health, for example, at Chapel Hill, was designed from the start to incorporate both sociological and genetic information. It was begun, in 1994, by Bearman, J. Richard Udry, and Kathleen Mullan Harris. The idea was to capture as much information as possible about the social circumstances, friendship networks, and family conditions of 21,000 teenagers in 132 schools, from grades 7 through 12. The survey included a disproportionate number of twins, both fraternal and identical, full- and half-siblings, and adopted kids, allowing preliminary analyses of the heritability of traits. Follow-up interviews were conducted a year later.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Nature, Nurture, Debate, Redux, The Chroncile Review, genetics, sociology, Science, sociologists, Genetics and Social Structure, gene-environment interactions, consilience, E.O. Wilson

Here is an excellent article from Robert Masters's January newsletter (The Crucible of Awakening) on the need for boundaries as a part of life, even if you have somehow become enlightened. It also parses the meaning of absolute vs. relative reality.
HAVING A NONDUAL PERSPECTIVE DOES NOT NEGATE THE NEED FOR BOUNDARIES!

Living from a nondual perspective — which is VERY different than just intellectually operating from such a perspective — does not mean that no boundaries are present, nor that there should not be any boundaries.

Awareness itself is without boundary, but in the world of form — in which everything exists through relationship — boundaries are both inevitable and necessary, from cellular to cosmic levels. Healthy boundaries safeguard and help maintain the integrity of our individuality, protecting what is being contained without crushing or atrophying it, making real intimacy possible (which requires not the shedding of boundaries, but rather the conscious expansion of them). In deep relational intimacy, we find freedom not from limitation, but through limitation, including the limitations inherent in boundary-formation. Just as good fences make good neighbors (as Robert Frost famously said), good boundaries make good connections.

We may, in the throes of embracing nondual philosophy, say that form is illusion (and therefore so are boundaries), etcetera after metaphysical etcetera, but getting caught up in such mentalizing simply keeps us from truly embodying ourselves. To the extent that form is illusion, so are we — but in the meantime we’ve got a lot of living and learning to do. Incarnation demands it.

Before we can consistently see through the apparent reality of form — nonconceptually recognizing its essential Emptiness — we need to get genuinely intimate with it and its structuring and evolution, resisting the temptation to mentally bypass or marginalize such undertakings. Making intellectual real estate out of nondual pronouncements does not constitute wisdom! Better to get out of our heads, and start really loving now instead of going on and on about unconditional love and other such should-infested ideals; better to fully manifest and deeply live our uniqueness instead of going on and on about our inherent inseparability.

Why let our recognition of our innate unity of Being separate us from our differences?

Honor the Absolute, and also honor the personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. Yes, they all are essentially the Ultimate in drag, but unless we are already living in and as That, approaching them only from a nondualistically-based belief system will obstruct our healing and awakening, depriving our uniqueness of the attention and energy it needs for its ripening.

Premature claims to nondual understanding are, unfortunately, quite common, especially among the cognocentrically inclined and the blindly compassionate. If we are insufficiently honoring the personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal — which requires, among other things, developing and maintaining healthy boundaries — then we are also insufficiently honoring the Absolute.

So beware of employing or operating from behind — rather than just referring to — a nondual perspective when you’re not significantly living it. It is very easy to intellectually appropriate nondual teachings and use them to justify certain of our actions, such as disrespecting our or others’ boundaries — after all, if we are all one and everything is absolutely perfect just as it is, then what’s the harm in saying yes to everything? What a treacherously slippery slope this is, laden with mindfields, spiritual naiveté, and the detritus of regurgitated nondual teachings!

The Absolute is IT. And so is the Relative. If we truly are abiding in and as the Absolute, we cannot help but honor and take wise care of the Relative, understanding right to our core that just because — as the Buddha taught — Form is Emptiness (and vice versa), it still gets to be Form. It may be an illusion, but it’s a real illusion. And Form, in order to be Form, needs boundaries, whether they manifest as membranes, walls, immune system policing, or the capacity to say a clear and unequivocal no under certain conditions.

If you are only saying yes to your yes, in the name of unconditional love and other such concepts, you are far from home. Let yourself also say yes to your no, without meeking it down, unapologetically letting your boundaries be known, ferociously if necessary!

Our work is not to be without boundaries — which would dishonor and vastly dilute our individuality, leading to a kind of psychosocial homogenization, a pablum of differences — but to develop the capacity to both contain and de-contain ourselves. How can we open our borders if we don’t already clearly have them? Those who cannot contain their anger are a danger, but so too are those cannot express their anger.

So, yes, open the gates, but under the right conditions, realizing that opening them just because of some “nondual” notion of unboundedness or wholesale acceptance is far from a skillful practice!
Tags: Robert Augustus Masters, Nondual Perspective, Boundaries, Psychology, Spirituality, Buddhism, nonduality, absolute, relative, personal, intrapersonal, interpersonal, Crucible of Awakening

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I haven't posted a Daily Om in ages, but I liked this one. There is definitely power in not knowing, and in not needing to know, which is the harder part (and I suck at it).
Honest Wisdom
The Power of Not Knowing

There is wisdom in not knowing, and it is a wise person who can say, "I don't know." For no one knows everything. There are many types of wisdom - from intellectual to emotional to physical intelligence. Yet, even deemed experts in their fields do not know all there is to know about mathematics, yoga, literature, psychology, or art. It is a true master who professes ignorance, for only an empty vessel can be filled.

There are many things in life that we don't know, and there are many things we may have no interest in finding out. There is freedom in saying "I don’t know." When we admit that we don't know something, we can then open ourselves up to the opportunity to learn. And there is power in that. We can’t possibly know everything. And when we think we do, we limit ourselves from growing and learning more than what we already do know. A person who can admit to not knowing tends to be more intellectually and emotionally confident than someone who pretends to know everything. They also tend to be more comfortable with who they are and don’t feel the need to bluff or cover up any perceived ignorance. People can actually end up appearing more foolish when they act as if they know something that they don't.

We would be wise to respect people who freely admit when they don't know something. They are being honest, with us and with themselves. And we, too, should feel no shame in saying, "I don't know." In doing so, we open ourselves up to the unknown. We can then discover what lies beyond our current levels of understanding. It is the wise person in life that answers questions with a question and inspires the pursuit of internal answers with a funny face, a shrug, and a comical, "I don't know."
Tags: Daily Om, The Power of Not Knowing, self exploration, knowledge, Spirituality, I don't know, Honest Wisdom

The Onion reports on the revolutionary new laptop from Apple.


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard


Tags: Apple, Revolutionary, New Laptop, No Keyboard, humor, technology, computers

Don Beck has been tasked with developing the framework for Large-Scale Psychology: The Design and Transformation of Whole Societies for the American Psychological Association. Obviously, this will be based in the Spiral Dynamics model and the original work of Clare Graves. This is huge for both the SDi model, and for the future of psychology in general.

Here is Dr. Beck's summary of the project mission:
Large-Scale Psychology: The Design and Transformation of Whole Societies

Cometh the hour …

Arguably the biggest news of the decade for friends of the Spiral: I am confident of introducing a new psychology division into the American Psychological Association.

Large-Scale Psychology is what I call it—a concept whose time has more than arrived.

My close colleagues and I look forward to introduce the concept of Large-Scale Psychology during a special symposium at the annual conference of APA next August in Toronto.

The proposed symposium title is “Large-Scale Psychology: The Design and Transformation of Whole Societies” and our brief proposal says it all, really:

“The recent election of Barack Obama as US president has uncovered major cultural shifts which, like tectonic plates, are bound to realign the surface of our social and political landscapes. Likewise, the current global financial crisis is but a symptom of deeper dynamics which, like invisible fractals, we have yet to fully grasp and assimilate. 21st Century versions of City-States are emerging, as are new alliances of ethnic and religious themes now streaking the planet due to (im-)migration, globalization, and the spread of information and instant networking via the Internet.

“The resulting fragmentation has outstripped our models of governance, economic parity, and understanding of deep cultural codes.

“Our research indicates that we are poised for an unprecedented, momentous leap in our perspectives on our psychological selves and ways to deal with behavioral patterns that now coexist or conflict within new sets of defining life conditions and new limiting boundaries.

“Our global era has become rife with conflicting, rigid ideologies, polarizing dynamics, proprietary interests, technological utopias, and egalitarian needs and demands. Confounding to many is also the desire to address “global” dynamics while simultaneously retaining focus on the “local.” Many more people newly search for meaning beyond self and how to have an impact on the larger society.

“In all these areas there exists a need for in-depth understanding of psychology at the “large scale” that will be able to provide us with a new macro frame of reference to address major and complex problems from a large-scale perspective; that can combine with new research in genetics and complex adaptive intelligences, along with sophisticated scanning software, to provide a framework and process to support problem-solving, policy formulation and, ultimately, human and cultural development.

“Historically, the various fields and branches of what we know as Psychology have attempted to adapt to new developments. However, too often our social and academic textbooks still reflect the outdated products, assumptions and world views that once fit the age in which they were created and popularized, now inadequate to the task.

“This symposium will introduce “Large-Scale Psychology,” an initial attempt to conceptualize a container that can hold and legitimize all of the spectrum views of psychology - from intrapsychic to interpersonal, to group, cultural-ethnic, and national perspectives and beyond. The presentation will focus on innovative initiatives around the psychology of communities, cities, movements, ethnicities, entire countries, as well as defined population and cultural regions.”We will present this growing body of knowledge, based on the seminal work of Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn W. Sherif in the field of Social Judgment, and of Clare W. Graves and his innovative Emergent, Cyclical Double-Helix Biopsychosocial Theory of Adult Human Development, and will illustrate its practical application in projects such as the transformation out of Apartheid in South Africa; strategies to develop a new Palestinian state in the West Bank; the dissolution of major racial and ethnic stereotypes; and strategies for producing healthy and sustainable communities, cities, and cultures.”

“This new field of Large-Scale Psychology has been field-tested in some of the most dangerous and complex places on the planet, such as South Africa during Apartheid and, at present, the Middle East. Fieldwork case illustrations are included.”

While official recognition of such a new APA division will be a really big deal, I should also note that I have been lecturing audiences and teaching my Spiral Dynamics Integral students the principles and processes of large-scale psychology since 2001 under a synonymous title: Macro*Memetics.

Some of the workshops I have offered along the way in Large-Scale Psychology a.k.a. Macro*Memetics have been “Nation-Building in Afghanistan,” “The Future of Cuba after Fidel Castro”, “After the United Nations, What?” and “CultureShift - Designing the Next World System,” to name just a few.

Tags: Don Beck, Large-Scale Psychology, The Design and Transformation of Whole Societies, Spiral Dynamics, Clare Graves, SDi, APA, Psychology, sociology

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The Guardian UK posted this excellent books review by Steven Rose, in which he looks at the latest theories about the human brain.
In search of the God neuron Steven Rose examines the latest theories about the human brain

Steven Rose

The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2008

Article history

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain
by Semir Zeki
234pp, Wiley/Blackwell, £16.99

Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
by David J Linden
276pp, Harvard, £13.95

The Evolution of Morality
by Richard Joyce
271pp, MIT Press, £11.95

Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth
by Andrew Gluck
145pp, Chicago, £9

Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London - the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry. In the biochemistry department I was rapidly disabused of any idea that my research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be "the organ of mind" - and still less that it might provide any help for the hospital's patients, whom I could dimly see through my laboratory windows. Neurochemistry meant grinding rats' brains up and extracting their enzymes; neuroanatomy was about cutting thin slices and staining them to be viewed under the microscope; neurophysiology was sticking minute electrodes into nerve cells and checking their electrical responses. To articulate the thought that this might tell one anything about "higher nervous functions" was strictly out of bounds. A dozen years ago, I heard a young American physiologist describe the study of consciousness as a "CLM" - a career limiting move. No topic for a young and ambitious neuroscientist, best left for those old enough to be experiencing the "philosopause" - said to affect scientists who had run out of research steam.

How times have changed! What was once dangerous territory is now the hottest theme in brain research. The subtitle of Semir Zeki's excellent new book is Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. David Linden's is brasher: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. Richard Joyce goes even further in claiming that our very morality is an evolved property of the brain. The rupture with the past is striking. From the ancients to the 20th century, it was philosophers who speculated about how the mind and brain might work. Now it is neuroscientists who are displacing the philosophers and theologians and telling us how we must behave. Three hundred years ago, David Hume argued that one could not derive an ought from an is, but now we are being told that our "oughts" - our moral feelings - are indeed "ises", genetically and developmentally incarnated in our brains. Whole new scientific disciplines - neuroeconomics, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics - are emerging. No wonder that an issue of Science, timed for November's US election, claimed that brain imaging could identify voting intentions.

Against these reductionist claims, the Jesuit philosopher Andrew Gluck attempts a spirited, but to my mind ultimately unsuccessful, rebuttal. His title makes reference to the neurologist Antonio Damasio, whose major book Descartes' Error and its succeeding volumes laid two charges against Cartesian philosophy. The first, the one that concerns Gluck, is Descartes's dualism, in which an immaterial soul interacts with a material brain through the pineal gland. Not so, says Damasio, and neuroscientists overwhelmingly agree: we are, and have to be, materialists. The world is made of one stuff, not two. Gluck demurs, accepting materialism for the physical sciences, idealism for the mind.

Damasio's second charge is perhaps more interesting - if not to Gluck, then to cognitive neuroscientists who see the brain as a problem-solving machine. On the contrary, brains are not primarily cognitive devices designed to solve chess problems, but evolved organs adapted to enhance the survival chances of the organisms they inhabit. Their primary role is to respond to the challenges the environment presents by providing the cellular apparatus enabling the brain's owner to assess current situations, compare them with past experience, and generate the appropriate emotions and hence actions. It is this evolutionary imperative within the particular line of descent leading to Homo sapiens that has resulted in our large and complex brains. As feminist sociologist Hilary Rose points out, Descartes's famous "cogito ergo sum" should be replaced by "amo, ergo sum."

However, our brains are indeed complex almost beyond comprehension. A hundred billion neurons (nerve cells) in each human cortex; perhaps a hundred trillion connections (synapses) between them. The numbers make even the US budget deficit look small. Most of the neurons are present at birth, which means that, averaged over the entire nine months from conception they are being born at the rate of about 250,000 per minute. Most of the synapses, however, mature after birth, giving ample opportunity for the connections to be modulated by experience. This is the tension between hard-wiring - specificity - and adaptation, or plasticity. Daringly, Zeki describes these wiring patterns as concepts - the brain, he claims, has both inherited and acquired concepts, a reductionism I'll return to shortly.

Each neuron has its intricate biochemistry; ensembles of neurons are grouped into modules, modules into systems concerned with sensory inputs and motor responses, emotional experience, spatial learning and many more. There is no general "command centre"; rather, all regions are connected by multiple bidirectional pathways, making the brain the paradigm of a self-organising distributed system. Linden provides an accessible and up to date guide through this maze, if you can cope with an excessively cheerful transatlantic style. But even he can't disguise the fact that when, each year, around 30,000 researchers meet at the American Society for Neuroscience jamboree, they mainly talk past one another. Biochemists and brain imagers may be studying the same hunk of tissue or function, but with very different methods and research programmes.

Take memory, my own research subject over the decades, as an example. I can tell you in molecular terms precisely what happens in particular regions of a young chick's brain in the minutes or hours following training on a simple task - which is pretty much the same as what happens in rats and mice too. Are these chemical changes to the brain correlates of memory, as many molecular biologists fondly believe? Or should memory be sought in the transient activity of cells in the brain regions that light up when I put my head in an imaging device and recall my fourth birthday party or what I bought in the supermarket last week? Both research programmes study what they call memory, but are they really exploring the same phenomenon?

So where in this tangle of neurons, synapses and systems should one look for love, creativity, morals and even God? In each cell's DNA, in individual neurons, or in ensembles of cells? Or is this even a valid question? To be sure, it is possible by stimulating particular brain regions to evoke sensations, memories, even emotions, but this does not mean that the particular memory or whatever is physically located in the region, merely that activity in that region may be a necessary correlate of the memory. The truth is that we don't have a comprehensive brain theory that lets us bridge the gaps between molecules, cells and systems, to enable us to begin to answer the question - which Linden cheerfully refers to as "that middle thing". Until we know this, isn't it a bit pretentious to think we can deal with the really big questions?

Zeki doesn't think so. One of the world's leading visual neurophysiologists, he has turned to brain imaging to explore matters as seemingly outside brain science's territory as beauty in literature and art - and even "romantic love". His scope is dauntingly ambitious, though his basic thesis is straightforward. The brain's hard-wiring provides the basis for the concepts of beauty that we all possess. However, it is the cultural context in which we develop that shapes what we actually find beautiful, and hence which particular art work or potential sexual partner we fall for. Furthermore, brains have evolved to deal with ambiguity. Hence our interest in the ambiguous images of a Necker cube or an Escher drawing. And, more controversially, the ambiguities of some seemingly unfinished great works of art, from Michelangelo to Cézanne. This is the brain-dependent neuroaesthetics - a term Zeki has made his own - with which a major part of his book deals.

Zeki has gone on to test part of his thesis in a fascinating and imaginative experiment, recruiting a group of young men and women who claimed to be "truly, deeply and madly in love" and imaging their brains as they look at photographs of their beloveds. Zeki and his colleagues identified specific brain regions that on average were more active when subjects viewed their lover's face than more neutral ones, such as friends of a similar age - much more fun than my own attempt at imaging people recalling their favourite supermarket purchases. Of course, there are always technical criticisms that can be levelled at such experiments, and brain imaging, involving underlying assumptions about the relationships between blood flow and neural activity, as well as complex mathematical transformations, is notoriously capable of over-interpretation, but the results are thought-provoking, and at the very least there's nothing inherently improbable about finding brain regions associated with emotional responses being activated in this way.

My problem with Zeki's argument is more fundamental. In what sense is it appropriate to say that the brain, an assemblage of interconnected cells, has "concepts", whether inherited or acquired? "Acquisition of knowledge," he says early in the book, "is a principal function of the brain." In this he is at one with many other leading neuroscientists. "You are your brain," says Nobel prize-winner Eric Kandel; "You are nothing but a bunch of neurons," wrote Francis Crick. The problem with this reductionism is to equate a part with a whole - an error I was fully guilty of when, many years ago, I wrote a book incautiously called The Conscious Brain. But it simply won't do. For sure, the brain is "the organ of mind" - always bearing in mind(!) that brains are in bodies, which have their physiological role to play. There are, it is chastening to note, as many nerve cells in the gut as there are in the brain.

However, it is not brains that have concepts or acquire knowledge. It is people, using their brains. To paraphrase the anthropologist Tim Ingold, I need legs to walk, but I don't say "my legs are walking". Similarly, I need my brain to think, but it is I, not my brain, who does the thinking. Indeed, Zeki gives the game away when he quotes Kant as saying "The Mind does not derive its laws ... from nature but prescribes them to her" and goes on to say "he might as well have been writing about the brain". No, no; the mind may need the brain, but it is not reducible to it, and we neuroscientists need to recognise our limitations. Of course, such reductionism is not confined to my trade (think of The Selfish Gene), but it is currently rampant among neuroscientists - as in the title of a recently formed Society for Molecular and Cellular Cognition.

Which brings me finally to Richard Joyce and the evolution of morality. For some years now, stretching back to EO Wilson in the 1970s, speculative evolutionary psychologists have been attempting to come to terms with David Hume's ought/is distinction. The questions are whether there are universal codes of moral behaviour, and if so, how did they emerge in humanity's evolutionary past. The claim that there are such "universals" has been explored by psychologists presenting toy ethical problems to their students, featuring such unlikely scenarios as whether they would be prepared to push a fat man over a railway bridge into the path of an oncoming train to stop the train and thus save the lives of a group of railway workers further down the track. Apparently many of us would jib at this, but would pull a lever to divert the train even though it would certainly kill a solitary man on the track.

I find these abstract scenarios unconvincing as predictions of what people would really do in such circumstances. However, evolution has resulted in a human species whose members are social animals, living in communities in which individuals need to cooperate to survive. Our offspring are born neotenous, initially helpless and for several years in need of parental care to survive and mature. These two features, among others, require that we learn to help others in our community whether or not they are closely genetically related, not to cheat or renege on our commitments to others, and so on. In this very general sense, how we think and behave are just as much part of our evolutionary heritage as are our average lifespan or limited sense organs.

Joyce makes an interesting distinction, though. If such behaviours are encoded within our DNA (or in how our brains develop) then they cannot be considered moral, for we have no choice but to behave that way. Morality only emerges if we are presented with a genuine choice of behaviours, so that we need to decide what we "ought" to do. I'm not sure how much this helps us. We may be born with a propensity to behave morally, just as Zeki argues that we are born with an inherited concept of beauty or of falling romantically in love. But any such propensity can only be expressed developmentally, shaped by the society and culture in which we are immersed. And clearly, what is regarded as morally appropriate varies across cultures and historical time. Take the prohibition expressed by the commandment that "thou shalt not kill another human". Is this "ought" statement a moral universal? Perhaps, but the Greeks did not think this prohibition extended to barbarians, and their philosophers could justify genocide. Capital punishment is still morally acceptable in many US states, just as it was in Britain until relatively recently - and, opinion polls show, it would still be acceptable to many Britons.

Killing the enemy in war, and even dying in the process oneself, as the flurry of articles and TV programmes around November 11 reminded us, remains "dulce et decorum". Dropping a one-tonne bomb as part of a "targeted assassination" or blowing oneself up as a suicide bomber in retaliation are both seen as morally appropriate acts. And one of our princes went off on his tour of duty in Afghanistan displaying the slogan that his task was "to do bad things to bad people". The concept of a universal sense of morality thus lacks any explanatory purchase on the way that we behave in any particular circumstances. This is not to collapse into Gluck's idealism, but to recognise that the biological is not the right level at which to seek to explain many crucial aspects of how and why we do what we do.

If humans do have an evolved sense of morality, or indeed of beauty or romantic love, the evidence shows that in practice our standards are remarkably flexible. Under these circumstances, to seek for their neurobiological correlates may be on a par with hunting the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. With the difference that the gold could at least be put to practical use.

• Steven Rose's The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind is published by Vintage. To order Accidental Mind for £12.95, The Evolution of Morality for £10.95 or Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth for £9, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

Tags: books, brain, Psychology, consciousness, Steven Rose, In Search of the God Neuron, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain, Semir Zeki, Accidental Mind, How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love Memory Dreams and God, David J Linden, The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce, Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth, Andrew Gluck

Douglas Rushkoff will be teaching an online course beginning next week - Life Incorporated: The Course. Here is his description, from his blog:

I’m teaching an online course, Life Incorporated, through the MaybeLogic Academy beginning January 12, for six weeks.

“Students” will get a working draft of the book (to be published in June) as well as six weeks of discussion and interrogation of the issues within and beyond it. I’ll be doing some live video lectures, as well, and inviting participants to help devise ways of restoring bottom-up commerce and social exchange to a world that seems incapable of abandoning its faulty, top-down, disconnected way of extracting value from people.

But the bulk of the exploration will be history, economics and social theory: How did corporatism become the dominant cultural ideology and operating system, who did it benefit, how did we internalize it, and what keeps it running?

Here’s a description from the catalog. If you are interested in taking the course but just don’t have any money, let me know and I’ll see if I can subsidize your participation.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.

Born in the Renaissance, necessitated by the Industrial Age, powered by workers, paid for by consumers and eventually sold back to us as shareholders, today’s faceless fascism - what Mussolini called “corporatism” - is a closed system that conquers not through exclusion but total inclusion. Everything, even dissidence, is assimilated. And in the process, life itself is reduced in its complexity, unpredictability, and intrinsic value.

Instead of depending on a parental dictator or nationalist ideology, the system of control to which we have succumbed depends on a society cultivated to see the corporation as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.

This course will explore how we got here, and what to do about it. We will begin with the first chartered corporations, and explore how their mandate to extract resources from distant colonies still lives on in the unbalanced relationship between today’s corporations and the communities they exploit. We will study how the invention of centralized currency, the division of the realms, and the notion of the “individual” all served to enhance the power of central authority by institutionalizing competition and artificial scarcity.

We will chronicle a project that began in earnest in the 1900’s, as early American industrialists sought to maximize the efficiency, enthusiasm and compliance of their work force; under the guise of philanthropy, they funded public schools designed to keep men “malleable,” and supported public servants who would keep them quiet.

Finally, we look at today’s perpetuators of the corporatist society, as well as their utter ignorance of the underlying biases of the marketing, media, and technology they are using. The corporatists themselves have left the building; we are in the thrall of an operating system we are now mistaking for reality. For given circumstances.

Participants in these lively, no-holds-barred discussions will receive free preview versions of Rushkoff’s book in progress, “Life Incorporated: How our world became a corporation and how to take it back,” to be published by RandomHouse in June 2009. They will also have exclusive access to new video/podcast lectures and live iChat/AV discussions. They will also witness and, if they choose, participate in the assembly of a documentary on the same subject. Each week, supplementary texts will be suggested or supplied.

The course costs $145.


Tags: culture, society, history, economics, education, Douglas Rushkoff, Life Incorporated, The Course, MaybeLogic Academy, social theory, corporatism

Powell's Books reprinted this review from The American Scientist. Alan Sokol is beloved by most conservatives for his prank that supposedly "proved" the foolishness of postmodern theory. Mostly he just made a few editors look bad, but that didn't stop him and other conservatives (who remain firmly entrenched in the modernist worldview) from claiming victory.

This new book then will be welcomed by some factions as a new assault on the relativism of science. Personally, I'm not buying his argument, and it seems either is the author of this review.
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
by Alan Sokal

Post Hoax, Ergo Propter Hoax A review by Michael Bérubé

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal played an elaborate trick on some unsuspecting humanists and social scientists -- namely, the editors of the leftist journal Social Text -- by submitting an essay filled with at least six kinds of nonsense. The editors didn't catch (or were willing to countenance) the nonsense and published the essay. In response, humanists and social scientists embarrassed (or outraged) by Sokal's hoax lashed out, sometimes in ways that made them look even worse than the editors; and Sokal found himself hailed by legions of fans and supporters who credited him with finally exposing the vacuity of (a) cultural studies, (b) literary theory, (c) postmodernism, (d) obscurantist jargon, (e) science studies, (f) people who write about disciplines they don't know much about, and (g) all of the above. Over the past 12 years, accordingly, I've met a number of colleagues who spit and curse at the very sound of Sokal's name -- and a much larger number of colleagues, journalists and general readers who credit Sokal with having proved once and for all that everything humanists have done since 1970 has been bunk.

Since then, Sokal has teamed up with Jean Bricmont and taken aim at epistemological relativism in the philosophy of science. Sokal and Bricmont note, for example (in an essay reprinted -- with revisions and updates -- as chapter seven of Sokal's new book, Beyond the Hoax), that major figures in science studies are given to making such assertions as "the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence" (Kenneth J. Gergen) and "there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such" (Barry Barnes and David Bloor, founders of the "strong programme" or "Edinburgh school" in science studies). "All this," remark Sokal and Bricmont, "indicates the existence of a radically relativist academic Zeitgeist, which is weird."

It is weird, but then, standards of weirdness tend to vary from discipline to discipline. Sokal, coming from a field with significantly stricter protocols for interpretation than those of literature, never seemed comfortable dealing with people who like to hypothesize imaginary gardens with real toads in them or to meditate on cold pastorals that tease us out of thought. But now that Sokal has left the terrain of literary theory, he has indeed gone beyond the hoax and into realms where the distinction between justified and unjustified belief actually matters to the world: specifically, the history and philosophy of science (which is sometimes conducted by people who are rigorously indifferent to the question of whether a scientific theory is actually true) and religion (which is practiced by people who are rigorously indifferent to the claim that beliefs should be rationally justified).

Beyond the Hoax actually devotes its first hundred pages to the hoax, but perhaps this is just a matter of providing context, like a recap of last week's episode ("Previously, on The Hoax . . . "). Sokal admits a bit too often that he's "proud" of his Social Text article, and there's too much repetition among the essays that follow, such that one finds oneself reading Bertrand Russell's snarky line on the advantages of theft over honest toil twice in 30 pages. The book's center of gravity lies in Parts II and III, where Sokal discusses "cognitive relativism in the philosophy of science," offers a "defense of modest scientific realism," charts the symbiotic relation between postmodernism and pseudoscience, and questions the place of religion in contemporary culture.

Sokal's defense of scientific realism is, as he claims, modest, and its modesty is what makes it cogent and convincing. Sokal starts from the proposition that "science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis," and he has good things to say about the "moderate" arguments of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The crucial distinction for Sokal (as for most reasonable people) is the difference between the "context of discovery" and the "context of justification": Sokal is willing (as are most reasonable people) to acknowledge that a potentially infinite number of factors, scientific and nonscientific, can contribute to the discovery of natural laws. The context of discovery can include variables ranging from the details of laboratory life to the vicissitudes of research funding, from Newton's willingness to believe in alchemy to Einstein's reluctance to believe in an expanding universe. But the context of justification is quite another matter: The determination of the existence of x rays or of the precession of Mercury's perihelion does not and cannot depend on factors extraneous to the scientific evidence relevant to the determination.

In other words, it makes great good sense to be a historical relativist with regard to the context of discovery; after all, Isaac Newton himself believed in God, and even Sokal, who regards such a belief as delusional, acknowledges that people of different times and places have different means of coming to conclusions about how the universe works. But properly scientific belief is distinguished from all other forms of belief precisely by its insistence -- one might want to call it a metabelief -- that justified true beliefs can be validated only by rigorous rational inquiry. Sokal attempts, here, to give philosophers of science their due with regard to the context of discovery, and to hold the line on the context of justification; he is, by his own admission, an autodidact in science studies, and though he is not quite as attentive to ambiguity as is Ian Hacking (see Hacking's discussion of dolomite in The Social Construction of What?), over the course of his posthoax career he has read widely and carefully, with a laudable mixture of intellectual curiosity and well-earned skepticism.

Along the way, Sokal pauses repeatedly to ask why so many people in the "postmodern" humanities and social sciences have been so hostile to the idea that the context of justification for scientific knowledge might in fact involve a form of epistemological realism. This is, as Sokal notes, an interesting sociological question, and I can offer only a few broad suggestions here.

When some people hear the term Western science, they think first of Hiroshima, Agent Orange and the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal -- and not, say, of the discovery of neutrino oscillation. This mordant skepticism about the benefits of Western science is then underlined by a dogmatic conviction that the Enlightenment was little more than a stalking horse for imperialism. As for why postmodern intellectuals would champion "local knowledges" and the "heterogeneity of language games" against the universalist aspirations of the Enlightenment, my sense is that when academic leftists in the humanities speak glowingly about "local knowledges," they're thinking of all the warm and fuzzy feelings we lefties have about "the local" -- from our local independent bookstore to our local independent food co-op. These are good things by every measure (local and universal), but they seem to have obscured the fact that many of the world's "local knowledges" are parochial, reactionary and/or theocratic. Likewise, the defense of the "heterogeneity of language games" has proceeded as if it is the moral equivalent of a defense of species diversity -- when, in fact, it is morally neutral, agnostic with regard to the question of whether the language games of charlatans or fascists should be preserved alongside the language games of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

No one has demonstrated the political polyvalence of postmodernism more convincingly than Indian biochemist Meera Nanda, whose 2004 book, Prophets Facing Backward, showed that opportunistic far-right Hindu nationalists have appealed precisely to postmodern and postcolonial critiques of Enlightenment universalism in order to promote "Vedic science" and a reactionary political agenda. Sokal follows Nanda's argument to the letter, and (mostly) to good effect. But here's where things get . . . well, weird, for lack of a better term.

Sokal seems to believe that an argument against relativism in the sciences requires a parallel argument against "postmodern" pragmatism in human affairs; accordingly, he devotes a few cursory pages of his book to a critique of neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. Now, I was never convinced by Rorty's shrugging dismissal of the idea that the physical sciences produce "objective" knowledge -- that is, knowledge whose validity is independent of any human observer. But I am convinced that theories of social justice are qualitatively different things than, say, neutrinos or Neptune. I'm therefore inclined to accept John Searle's distinction between the worlds of "brute fact" and "social fact," and to insist that in the world of social fact, things like "theories of social justice" are indeed socially constructed.

This position puts me at odds with people such as Sam Harris, whom Sokal discusses at length in his chapter on religion. Harris writes, in The End of Faith,

In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be "true" or "false" not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts. Realists believe that there are truths about the world that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered -- and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.

"Postmodern" pragmatists such as Rorty and myself think this is a truly unfortunate way of thinking about truths in human affairs. We prefer to say, for example, that when Thomas Jefferson declared it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, he was inventing the idea, not discovering it -- and that it couldn't possibly have been self-evident, since almost no one on the planet believed it at the time. It wasn't a preexisting, observer-independent entity like Neptune; it was a proposal for how to think about our fellow beings, and to this day many of our fellow beings continue to think otherwise. Sokal's discussion of Harris's book is scrupulously fair, and takes its distance from the most reductive aspects of Harris's attacks on religion; but Sokal might have taken some distance as well from Harris's "realist" conviction that philosophy is a kind of epistemological physics in which one discovers immutable "truths about the world" lying latent in the aether -- not least because that's precisely the way moral and religious fundamentalists think about right and wrong.

This point is, or should be, central to Sokal's project, for Sokal himself argues (quite plausibly) that fundamentalism -- and not abstruse literary theory -- is the most important challenge to science and reason. That Sam Harris should share an absolutist theory of truth with religious fundamentalists may sound a little strange, but then, these are strange times, and one finds soi-disant "rational" arguments turning up all over the map. Case in point on the opposite side: Unwittingly bolstering Sokal's argument, one prominent science-studies scholar has recently weighed in on the side of people who believe in angels: Not long after enthusiastically blurbing Meera Nanda's book, saying "this first detailed examination of postmodernism's politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists," sociologist of science Steve Fuller arrived in Dover, Pennsylvania, to testify in favor of the teaching of "intelligent design" in that school district's seventh-grade science curriculum. And he did so, tellingly, by deliberately confusing the context of discovery with the context of justification, argui