Skeletons rule!

On the superiority of endoskeletons

There are two great instances in the history of life of skeletons appearing on the inside versus the outside of organisms- the vertebrate skeleton, compared with precursors like insects with their exoskeletons, and the eukaryotic cytoskeleton, compared with the cell wall of typical bacteria. Both instances paved the way for great innovations of size and complexity.

It has often puzzled me that squishy naked mammals should have risen to the top of the food chain, rather than the more abundant insects or other, better protected, better architected, and handsome-er species. We seem so vulnerable, with pathetic teeth, muscles, and skin, barely-existent hair, let alone armor. Of course, we've got brains, and that's pretty much it.

At the beginning of life, creatures didn't need protection. Proto-cells had enough to do to survive- no predators existed. And before the pre-Cambrian explosion, the first known animals were flaccid pillows of cytoplasm. But once predators came on the scene, body plans quickly adapted, becoming enclosed in bacterial cell walls in the first instance, and in shells, chitin, and the like among the animals, leading to the long reign of Trilobites and similar creatures.

However the first response to a crisis is not always the best one, and many organisms kept their heads down and did not adopt external protection, making do with other strategies, like burrowing, distastefulness, speed, etc. Often these were predators themselves, like amoebae and jellyfish. External protections can also be discarded in evolutionary time, if they are not too deeply embedded in the body plan, as happened with aplacophora and nudibranches, both subclasses of mollusks.

On the micro scale, bacteria had little in the way of internal structure for billions of years, other than a few optimizations in locating their DNA near their membranes, which helped coordinate cell division with division of the DNA, the membrane, and the cell wall.

But then came along eukaryotes, formed from the fusion of two vastly different types of bacteria- by one theory, for metabolic cooperation, or by another, through simple phagocytosis. At any rate, this fusion created a revolutionary new type of cell that dispensed with the exterior wall (later re-made in fungi and plants from different materials) and developed instead an interior, or cyto-skeleton.

Mitosis, where the cytoskeleton (green microtubules) temporarily reforms to manage division of DNA (blue).

The cytoskeleton makes two basic contributions over the preceding bacterial cell wall- one, allowing cells to become protean- flexible and active protoplasmic blobs that can seek prey, as do many of our immune system cells. And second, helping manage the increased internal complexity of eukaryotes, facilitating their great size with membranous organelles, multiple chromosomes ... bits and pieces that need to be located consistently, moved occasionally, and inherited reliably. Our cells are not just bags of protoplasm, but ecosystems of molecules and larger structures, in which the cytoskeleton plays an organizational role.

The cytoskeleton also provided a cabling system to allow different cells to interact, paving the way for multicellularity. Eukaryotic cells touch at cytoskeletal attachment points, which are not just passive anchors, but also active participants in migration and signaling, helping cells touch and talk with their neighbors.

Later on in the Cambrian, once oxygen levels rose to respectable levels, allowing larger life forms, and Earth's climate got past a devastating series of ice ages, a new kind of skeleton emerged... the organismal endoskeleton. Compared to the armor of insects, skeletons are far more efficient, exchanging a surface-proportional structure for a linear structure with consequent reductions in weight. This allowed animals with skeletons to become far larger (think elephants, dinosaurs, and whales).

But what about the vulnerability of an unarmored exterior? There is where the story gets interesting, since being naked gives priority to reducing harm through smarts or size rather than through armor. Unarmored microbes are the predators and behemoths of their world. Think amoeba and paramecium. On the macro scale, the implications of endoskeletons are similar, with large size becoming its own form of defense. But more importantly, if the exterior skin is turned into a sensitive sensory system, with sensing hairs, whiskers, various forms of touch, all abetted with remote sensors like vision, hearing, and smell, plus a big brain, then the weakness of surface vulnerability can be turned into a strength.

The endoskeleton allowed for a greater range of evolvability, including encouraging organisms to turn themselves into multi-sensory platforms, much as our modern navy has become more effective by developing over-the-horizon sensing and attack rather than turning ships into super-armored tankers. Humans are, of course the ultimate expression of this evolutionary trend, not just mammals with endoskeletons, but nakedly hairless besides, vulnerable to every slight of the elements and enemies. Yet they have succeeded by replacing dumb armor with a combination of efficient and sensitive physiology and formidable intelligence.

• Science depends on technology, which agrees with my post about science in ancient Greece- That it was the lack of technology which kept philosophy from becoming science.
• An important story on chronic fatigue syndrome.
• You call this insurance?
• Alas for atheism.
• Creationism, muslim style.
• Nice overview of common good economics.
• Are fundamentalists running the drug trade?
• A fond look back at the Clintons.

To warm or not to warm

Is the science of global warming really settled?

I recently listened to an interesting podcast from the CBC (the Deniers), interviewing a skeptic of global warming. Many other deniers are out there, so it is a pressing question. Its importance is huge.. none could be greater, so I will try to get to some data. Of course, a true firehose of debunking comes from the blog climateprogress, so go there if you want chapter and verse.

What I am reading in the scientific literature clearly indicates that global warming is happening, will get substantially worse, and needs to be mitigated to avert rapid global change. Unfortunately, the catastrophe is more relevant for our silent co-passengers on planet earth than it is for humanity. And it will be far more serious for our poorer human co-passengers than for inhabitants of rich countries who are making all the mess. If global warming is true and imminent, the most important case for its mitigation is moral and aesthetic- the duty we have to our fellow creatures and to the biosphere generally to keep it healthy and beautiful instead of turning it into a science fiction dystopia. Warming is just one more facet of harm we are doing to the biosphere, in addition to fishing out the oceans, filling them with trash, driving species to extinction, and destroying ecosystems by a thousand cuts.

The CBC interview was with Lawrence Solomon, head of Energy Probe Research Foundation, a Canadian environmental organization. This is a right-wing think tank with apparently serious environmental credentials (only in Canada!), one of whose aims is to solve common goods problems by extending private ownership over common goods. How that would work with the atmosphere.. well, their web site is unhelpful on that score.

In the interview, Solomon brings up several substantive points:

1. The famous "hockey stick" curve was based on bad science and bad statistics, and has since been withdrawn, even by its sponsor, the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

2. Prominent scientists are lining up on the denier side, such as Freeman Dyson. Typically, scientists at the end of their careers are the only ones free enough to take this position, since it can be deadly to anyone still building a career, in view of the heavy bias in the scientific community on the other side.

3. The current decade has been cooler than the last one, and the last one was not the warmest ever, as advertised, but only the second warmest, second to the 1930's.

4. Climate models are not well-made and the climate is not as well undestood as some would have us believe. How do clouds affect the system? How is their origin related to CO2? How much do aerosols cool the earth? How, if regular weather forcasts are poor just 7 days in advance, are we to take seriously climate models that purport to forcast decades ahead?

5. Isn't CO2 the gas of life? OK- this is not a serious point, but he does raise it towards the end, as both participants seem to let down the guard of the interview as a serious, scholarly dialog.

I'll take these points in reverse order.

5. Solomon said nothing about the general theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and thus by any reasonable model, that more CO2 leads to higher heat retention from solar radiation. The example of Venus is instructive and frightening. The real question is whether the amounts of CO2 in question (the recent rise from pre-industrial levels of ~280 parts per million [ppm] to the current 380 ppm and rising) are significant- how much warming they (and future increases) might cause. This was not discussed. To say that they cause no warming is not plausible. To say that they cause so little as to be noise in the system might be conceivable, but my impression is that the data disagree strongly.

The history of the earth is quite interesting in this respect. We started out much like Venus, with large amounts of CO2, but with our larger distance from the sun (getting roughly half the light per unit area), we were not trapped in a greenhouse from the start. Additionally, the sun was less luminous at earlier times and earth was blessed with huge amounts of water. Over time, earth's CO2 was mostly withdrawn from the atmosphere by mineral deposition (limestones, etc.), and by life, which in turn created all the atmosphere's oxygen (which was strictly absent from the early atmosphere). An interesting illustration in a recent Science magazine graphs out what we know of the relative CO2 levels over the last half-billion years:

The "RCO2" on the Y-axis is relative CO2, relative to the present level of ~350 ppm at one. The end of the high-CO2 era (400 to 300 MYA) corresponds to the Carboniferous period of geologic history, which is to say, the time when huge amounts of carbon were withdrawn from the atmosphere and deposited in coal beds and other geologic formations by living organisms. Oxygen levels were also high, allowing some insects to grow to enormous proportions, like desk-size dragonflies with 75cm wingspans. The whole earth was a big sauna, apparently, though the era ended with glaciations, as one can infer from the plummeting CO2.

For the last 800,000 years, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has varied cyclically between ~180 and ~280 ppm. (Indeed the paper I am taking this from extends this observation to "These results show that changes in pCO2 and climate have been coupled during major glacial transitions of the past 20 myr, just as they have been over the last 0.8 myr, supporting the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was an important modulator of climate over this interval via direct and indirect effects." So we are going in an unprecedented direction, which alone is cause for trepidation and action.

4. Climate models are indeed rather complex affairs, and not all variables are equally easy to model. For instance, geenhouse forcing is easy to model- the infrared heat emitted from the earth after absorbing sunlight is trapped by CO2, water vapor, methane, and the other greenhouse gasses. On the other hand, the formation of clouds seems to be less easy to model, depending more on the dynamics of the winds and interactions between layers of different temperature. So there is quite a bit that is not known, and the specter of chaos theory and complexity hangs over some of these issues. Yet on the other hand, physics-based climate models have gotten very good, being able to model past events as a test for forward predictions. And of course the news lately has been that warming in the arctic has been faster than virtually all models predict, so they may be excessively conservative (possibly due to positive feedback effects that accelerate climate change and may not be modeled yet).

3. The current decade is the hottest on record, as shown by the following graphs taken from a recent Science article (and see these graphs for up-to-the-minute data). The interesting thing is that the current decade should instead have been cooler, based on slight declines in solar flux (due to a quiet phase in the sunspot cycle, among other issues). So this persistent rise in temperature is all the more significant.

Indeed, one other interesting aspect of this graph is that it tracks a long-term cooling trend for the rest of the last 2000 years (gray line, which focuses on temperatures in the arctic). The top-most line (F) tracks a slight long-term decline in solar input to the northern hemisphere due to solstice precession, which provides a rationale for this long-term cooling trend. So we might possibly have been headed for a new ice age. We may be thankful to our emissions staving off that catastrophe, but it is obvious that we are over-shooting in the other direction.

2. A few scientists have been casting suspicion on global warming. Well, a few scientists cast suspicion on HIV as the source of AIDS as well. There are good reasons why the scientific consensus has coalesced around global warming for well over a decade, some of which are given above. The combination of solid data and solid theory makes for a compelling case. The fact that the data had not, up until the last few decades, risen above the climate noise in a way apparent to the most jaded and critical observer is unfortunate, but no reason to criticize those who were right rather than those who have been wrong.

A countervailing view of eminent scientists is that they often wade into areas about which they know very little (Freeman Dyson), and they may hunger for a larger spotlight, which they can only gain by bucking a consensus (Richard Dawkins), whether sensibly or not. The history of Nobel Laureates is littered by such crankiness (Nobelesse oblige?). Criticism of this kind serves a critical function, of course- to hold a consensus's feet to the fire, as it were.

As a biologist, some of the most convincing evidence for me (aside from sea level rise and many other indicators) has been the relentless migration of plant and animal ranges northward. This process is just the kind of long-term, slow change that evens out noise from the system and reflects underlying changes of climate. Montane species, like pikas in the Sierras, can not just pick up and head north into the Yukon- they may run out of habitat entirely.

1. Lastly, the hockey stick graph. As shown above, despite all the controversy about earlier versions and their somewhat exagerated data, the basic graph is correct. It may have been a little ahead of its time, as was true for Gregor Mendel as well, as some scientists compromise the integrity of their process (data collection and presentation) while tripping over themselves to show a result they have become convinced of, and which may be vindicated by later, more careful work. Such shoddiness can not be excused, but climate change is one more classic case where the truth was due to come out sooner or later, and is now on completely firm ground.

In this case, the better jump we have on the phenomenon, the more rational and moderate our policy response can be. So spending the last decade on disinformation from the fossil fuel industries, the Lomborg acolytes, and George Bush's imitation of an ostrich, has been extremely damaging for our long-term ability to mitigate the climate change that is already happening, much more of which is set in concrete for decades to come. Since the climate is the ultimate commons, it is particularly difficult to address from a game theory/economic perspective, making this loss of time doubly damaging.

• NYT covers the IPCC blues
• Arctic warming, NYT.
• Northwest passage- opened for the first time in 2007, then also in 2008
• No impact guy on what we would gain, even if the science was all wrong
• Ooops- I missed blog action day!
• A nice philosophically couched discussion of global warming and scientific uncertainty.
• A sample skeptic blog
• A delightful essay on science, over at the Oracle blog
• On the evolution of the ear, with intermediate forms!
• Religion on Wall Street
• A fine page on Schopenhauer
• Gregor on the vise of recession + rising oil prices
• OK, let's just clear the air on this whole religion thing!

Afghan reboot

What should we do now? Boots or no boots?

The Afghan war/nation building/counterinsurgency/hearts-and-minds operation has largely gone down the drain. A recent report described the utter futility of our training efforts for the Afghan army and police force, whose members are cashing out and disappearing as fast as we "train" them, then coming back for more pay and more training with new names. Pakistan remains likewise uncontrolled, with their border home sweet home for insurgents and jihadists of all sorts.

The core of the problem is corruption. While there is plenty of corruption and stupidity on the part of US and its contractors, the more serious problem is that the Afghan government is fully corrupt, with little hold on the affections and respect of the populace or any plausible way to engage with it, certainly not after the shameful election antics just witnessed. In Iraq, the US faced a population that had long been used to a powerful central state. However frightfully it fell apart into a lord-of-the-flies free-for-all, Iraqis generally nurtured the hope that eventually chaos would recede, either at the hands of another strongman, or directly at the hands of the US occupiers, and they could resume something like normal life in a semi-developed country.

But in Afghanistan, the political culture has never gotten to the point of effective centralization, let alone parliamentary democracy, checks and balances, technocracy, and the many other ingredients of modern statehood. Decades of civil war have eviscerated basic expectations of normalcy. The situation is reminiscent of the rotten governments of South Vietnam, successively installed by the CIA via coups d'état as the US blindly tried to prop up the South with hardly any knowledge of its culture or history. In effect, the US was busily turning the population of the South against its government instead of for it, giving them over into the arms of the Vietcong.

As the Taliban are today, the Vietcong were indigenous (i.e. grass-roots), nationalistic, ruthless, and far more efficient than the government or US forces. They had inherited a mantle of anti-imperialism, first against the Japanese, then the French, as the Taliban have against the Russians and the Americans. Their all-important currencies were credibility and sympathy- sympathy by being of the rural South Vietnamese culture, and credibility both through their history and by way of their organizational skill and successes against their enemies.

How are we winning the sympathy of the population of Afghanistan? It is a complicated question, but basically, the answer varies between not very well and not at all. The vision of a well-run state with women's rights, security, and economic development is, in the Afghan context, a far-away utopia. The competing vision of traditional Islam and plenty of money from poppy cultivation makes a good deal more immediate sense, at least to the middle power-brokers- the warloads, tribal leaders and family heads. And if the Taliban has more effective grass-roots mafia-like enforcement of power and security, then that would be icing on the cake, despite other problems with their vision- that unremitting and barbaric shariah is hardly palatable to most Afghans either.

My take on all this is that our numbers of soldiers is not the issue. The issue is the nature of the government, and how well-aligned it is in the near and far term with its people's aspirations. The situation is worth saving, both for our own interests, for our historical debt to Afghanistan, and for purely humanitarian reasons. The answer is to boot the government out as soon as possible and replace it with direct temporary control by NATO.

The local nation-building process needs to begin not from the top down as it did with power-brokers held over from prior puppet governments, tribal organizations, mujahideen and civil war antagonists. These may well end up being the relevant powers in a new Afghanistan, but they should get there from the bottom up. A caretaker central government organized by NATO could rapidly organize a skeletal federal system and local civic processes and elections (supplemented by jirgas where those might offer extra inclusion and participation). There should be a step-wise process working up the ladder of governance, from local to provincial to national, focusing on each in sequence so that there are civic institutions and experience at each level before the next level is put under local control.

Such a government would not be filled with Europeans, but have a mix of Afghans and NATO / UN officers enforcing rules against corruption and ineffectiveness, with accountability flowing from the top, and all the churn and active firing and hiring that would imply. It will take time to assemble an effective government and weed out bad elements, but it will take less time through reconstitution than it will by jollying the current system along while also fighting a war at the same time. We should honestly recognize that we gave it a good shot through the original Loya jirga, national elections, etc., but need a do-over at this point, from strictly empirical criteria. In most measures, Afghanistan's government rates worst in the world right now, roughly even with that of Somalia.

A new provisional government would not be terribly strict or controlling in most aspects. For instance, poppy cultivation should be legalized and freely allowed. Given the choice between losing the war, the country, and the war on drugs, or just the war on drugs, the latter is the better choice. Likewise, if local communities choose to install tribal elders as their representatives, (through local elections with secret ballots), that is fine as well. Land reform should be encouraged, buying out large landholders and assuring individuals of right of tenure. Credit reform is needed as well, encouraging microlending and other modern instruments for farmers on all scales. The point is to make citizen service, efficiency, and non-corruption the focus of government, all sheltered under an umbrella of security that assures citizens that the Taliban won't be coming back unless it is their free choice. This is best done from the ground up with civic processes starting at the grass roots.

That is the lesson I take from Vietnam- that politics is critically important. Terrorism/insurgency has no pull or point to it without a political background, which in most cases is a government that is incompetent, uncaring, and corrupt. Winning hearts and minds is not just a figure of speech, but the essential element to giving Afghanistan hope. The current government has demonstrated its inability to provide that hope. While foreigners automatically have many liabilities in winning local hearts and minds, and in running the upper levels of the Afghan government, it would be difficult to do a worse job than our chosen government is doing right now. Whatever we do militarily, it will not have any point without a better solution to the core political problem.

• George Packer on Holbrook and Afghanistan.
• Frank Rich on Obama's choice in Afghanistan.
• Vietnam- read A Bright and Shining lie, by Sheehan, among many others.
• Cohen on individualism in America.
• Apparently, we are a Christian nation, after all!
• Is the Vatican a state? If so, shouldn't the Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama be as well? And others?
• Another bubble in its infancy.
• Lie about climate change? Who would ever do such a thing?
• On death and philosophy

Islam and the yellow submarine

What makes the Ummah different from the European nation-state?

Another week, another book. "God's Rule" by Patricia Crone, describes the first 600 years of Islam through the eyes of its thinkers about community, salvation, and government. The point she hammers home time and again is that Muslims think of their polity very differently than we do in the European tradition. She invokes a very nice metaphor of the caravan, (which I have updated using a Beatles song), to say that Muslims equate community with religion with government. They are all the same thing- they hang together in an idealized community that travels along a straight and narrow path, obeying the will of God in this life and, if right-guided, obtaining salvation in the next. Given this conception, it only makes sense that stragglers, detractors, and skeptics would be harshly punished for imperiling the community, and that religious leaders would tend just as much to the community as a body as to any individuals within it.

The Muslim conception derives straight from the Arabic tribal situation where one's leader was in charge of everything- war, women, worship, navigation, inspiration, punishment, ... the whole operation, top to bottom, as eventually modelled by the perfect man, Muhammad. This unitary organization obviously became untenable when the Muslim world rapidly bloomed to vast proportions after their conquests. Yet it took hundreds of years for Muslims to break apart any of these communal elements in principle, and when they did, it was not to separate religion from the community at large (as we have in the secularized and individualized West), or to separate mosque from state on a principled basis. The Islamic compromise was to resign themselves to governments that were hopelessly imperfect, even corrupt. By their conception, living with ill-guided governments was a way to avoid civil war, since no government could be perfect. But at the same time, governments were never viewed as unislamic:

"As far as medieval Islam is concerned, it [separation of government and religion] stands for a change in the manner in which God's government was executed on earth, not for a process whereby government was emptied of religious significance. It means that there ceased to be a single person endowed with the fullness of God's delegated power: scholars took over the task of guiding people; the deputy of God was left with the coercive role, which eventually passed to kings. This was a separation of power and religion comparable to that which obtained in medieval Europe, in which God kept His sword in one institution and His book in another. But in both cases, the sword and the book alike continued to be God's. He just did not assign both to the same keeper anymore. Similarly, when amirs, sultans, and kings are referred to as secular rulers, it means that they were rulers of a type that could appear in any society rather than rulers of the specific type called for by the Sharia: there was nothing specifically Islamic about them. It does not mean that they had no religious role to play. However external they were to Islam by origin, and sometimes outlook too, their prime role was still as protectors of a religious institution."

And of course, just as Europeans had their fairy tale visions of benevolent states helmed by happy kings and queens with stable and wise lines of succession populated by princes and princesses, Muslims had their own fairy tale of state- the Islamic Ummah as a vast whole, (indeed the entire world!), helmed by Islamic scholars of the highest rank and merit (such as Ayatolla Khomeini) who would be sure to guide the yellow submarine in the most godlike direction, for the benefit of everyone's salvation. At the core is a communitarian interpretation of what God wants- not so much individual hearts dedicated to him, (indeed, Muslims can be rather blasé about what happens behind closed doors- they may be totalitarian, but they tend not to be Orwellian), but mass and public obeissance, exemplified in the incredibly durable phenomenon of Friday prayers.

Unfortunately, here is where the tale turns a little dark, since we have to deal with jihad. Crone gives little attention to the post-9/11 platitudes of Islam being a religion of peace, or the pleasant and popular postion that perhaps it is the "inner" jihad that is most significant in Islam. No, while "jihad" means striving (in the path of God) and thus has gotten various connotations, especially among the Sufis, the original verse outlining this pillar of Islam uses the word "al-quital", which means fighting and warfare quite explicitly. Crone mentions ".. it is a bit of a mystery that jihad came to be the technical term for holy war." And of course the historical and scholarly records bears this out abundantly, with conquest of infidels and their land one of the favorite activities of Muslims, promoted by their scholars up to the present day.

And conversion in the sense of Christian individual conversion was not even the point, again in keeping the communal/imperialist ethos of Islam. If an adversary was offered the truth of Islam and refused it in advance of battle, that was it- if defeated, they were put under Islamic/Arabic rule, and their conversion was no longer a prime issue. They or their descendents would convert in due time, given the many political, financial, and social disabilities they would otherwise be under. This is the story of Iran, which struggled for centuries to come to terms with its traumatic subjugation to Arabic Islam.

Today, the Islamic world struggles with this unitary and communal mind-set which makes the perfect (scriptural guidance) the enemy of the good (liberal, effective government). The decently-governed Islamic states tend to be on the periphery or have other unusual conditions, like benevolent monarchs- Turkey, Jordan, UAE, Indonesia. The Islamic world remains unable to fully comprehend or assimilate the political science revolutions of the European world- strong, constitutional, and federally governed national states anchored in liberal domestic freedoms, set in a competitive international system (too competitive at times, looking back over history, but that is another matter).

A prime example is the Palestinian dilemma. When European Jews first colonized the lands of Palestine, their fervent hope was to found a state in the European model, which they did at the first possible opportunity. In that state, they found both a psychic homeland and the kind of strength possible under a well-run government. In contrast, the Palestinians have never taken statehood very seriously, being easily corrupted and divided by the British during the mandate period, then succeeding to a series of clownish excuses for governments down to the present day, exemplified by both Fatah and Hamas. The Palestinians beseeched the Ummah to save them, and while the Arab community did make a couple of disastrous stabs at Israel well over thirty years ago, it could not do one essential task for the Palestinians, which was to organize them.

Power comes from organization, and to leave temporal power in the hands of venal, corrupt tribal leaders while awaiting salvation through the five pillars of Islam, complete with the regular Friday rehearsal of misdirected grievances and prayers, is to give up any hope of effective politics and community power. At one time, sheer audacity and ferocity was enough to win an empire. No more. Modern states have awesome powers commensurate with their organization and based on broad, internal support generated by good governance. The perennial corruption and misgovernment of Muslim states, whether due to tribalism / feudalism (not to say feud-ism) that predates Islam, or to the misplaced ideals of Sharia and a certainty that political science was solved 1400 years ago, is fatal to the basic aspirations of Muslims, nowhere more so than in Palestine. (Though Afghanistan comes a close second- more on that next week.)

• An important corrective, or at least adjunct, to Keynes, on rebalancing the role of central banks. It conceives of recent economic growth as being a succession of bubbles inflated by increasingly permissive monetary policy jags in response to each prior bubble. It claims that bubbles can be fought in advance by monetary policy, and should be, so that economic performance is better controlled over the long term.
• How well do medical markets really work?
• Deeply insightful article on American geostrategy in the broadest sense.
• Off-the-hook blog post from San Diego State University.
• Props to Trotsky
• What comes of the theory of religious law superceding secular law, here in the US.

I'm a little neuron!

Where this blog fits in.

Blessed reader! Let me get you a cup of tea, comfortable chair, and a pipe. Don't smoke? How about some nice mood music while we settle in? There now. It's been a year of blogging, and what a fun ride it's been! Perhaps you've had a few chuckles, a few sighs, and some smoke coming out of your ears. Well, I appreciate your attention in any case.

For me, it has been a pleasure. I thought the ideas would dry up by now, but they keep trickling in, for better or for worse. Not only that, but I have a reading list of other blogs that grows by the week, from wingnut economists to climate alarmists. It has been fascinating to tap into this inspired and free-form media experience.

I've begun to think of blogs as neurons in the great cyber-brain. Some are stimulatory, proposing new ideas and policies, while others are inhibitory, given to critique. Some gather actual news, serving as perceptual neurons, while most, (as in the brain), reprocess and refine that news to generate deeper, or just orthogonal, (or just derivative), insights. Over a week's time I gather ideas and links through an arbor of dendrites, all mangled and processed into an axonal splurge on the weekend's post, distributed to you, dear reader- the few, the proud, the blogotariat!

What is this cyberbrain doing? Many bloggers interconnect in primitive circuits, (mostly positive feedback, but what the heck!), developing ideas, arguments, tastes, memes. Until they have a random spike of expression to the "real" world, like scooping some news or changing someone's mind. What used to be dinner-table conversations over the news can now be transcontinental musings, analysis, and discussion, injecting quite a bit more variety into the average person's information diet.

The whole pulsing inter-piped web of blogs, discussions, news, etc. is our expressed consciousness. It shapes how we think, subjecting privately held models and fixations to critique while spreading more sophisticated and diverse conceptions of the world. Or perhaps just spreading group-think. It is hard to tell the difference before these ideas meet the real world in some empirical test, like the financial crisis through which we are passing. But they have effect, as the progressive buzz of thought propagates to the neuromuscular junctions- those who have actual effects on the world, deciding how to invest, whom to vote for, and how to conduct our affairs.

This collective brain progresses at a glacial pace- we are still dealing with cultural inheritances from Rome! But it does progress, and we all participate. The cultural movement towards gay rights has been astonishing, in its slowness but inexorable progress, little by little, as people's minds are turned with new understandings.

Are some neurons more equal than others? Yes- as long as old media lives and gives perches to super-bloggers like the New York Times columnists, FOX cable commentators, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, some will have megaphones far louder than the common run. A recent article in the New Republic was devoted to the influence of one columnist in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, who is leading the world's financial elite by the nose through this crisis. (Well, they made it sound that way.) In economics, as elsewhere, everyone knows something and no one knows enough (or even very much), so the one person who knows a little more than the rest of the field gains powerful influence, at least until the next crisis uncovers yet other forms of ignorance and forgetfulness.

But increasingly the platform will not dictate the readership. Assembling a network of blogs and other reading on the internet requires little regard to the sponsor, the quality of advertising, or the ancillary features. Each writer will gain an audience based mainly on individual consistency and quality. Such Darwinism occurs on several levels in the brain as well. During development, far more neurons are born than ultimately survive. Those that make no connections die, while those that do connect, survive. Later during active brain function, ever-changing coalitions of neurons constitute the focus of attention and consciousness by synchronized firing, in a sort of competition for participation in a metastable system. Thirdly, while regional specialization in brain is broadly mapped out in development, substantial regions of neurons can change their functions depending on use even through adulthood, such as when a limb is lost and brain regions associated with its sensation and action are taken over by those operating the nearby body regions or other senses. Competition lies at the heart of many information economies.

• Glen Greenwald rakes David Brooks, NYT über-blogger, over the coals for his neocon warrior schtick.
• The Nation similarly deals with other megaphones of the right.
• More on-the-ground news from Afghanistan- who are we kidding?
• The sense of self: magic, or neuronal?
• Homeschooling goes awry.
• Statistics and the bell curve.

Fear of Freedom

What happened to Greek rationalism?

Mining another gem from the local Catholic library, I found Oxford Don E. R. Dodd's 1951 classic, The Greeks and the Irrational, recommended by blog correspondent Wayne Dynes. A pleasure to read, with both erudition, wit, and generous notes/references, the book is about the various cults, religions and mind-sets afoot in ancient Greece. Especially about how the Greek religion gradually transformed from the classic/archaic conglomerate of honor, militarism, and the irrational daemon at one's side ... to a split between intellectual rationalists and the mass of people who regressed to various branches of magic. In Dodd's telling, the former were still not entirely rational, but enough to scoff at the old beliefs, to radically twist and revise them (as Plato did), and to inspire centuries of respect and even (ironically) abject devotion. The people, now deserted by the leading intellectuals (or vice versa), regressed bit by bit into magic.

This split is illustrated in the trial and execution of Socrates, the founding event of recorded philosophy and paradigmatic episode of anti-intellectualism. The trial signalled the breakdown of societal consensus on religion when, after the long and disastrous Peloponnesian war, Athens sought scapegoats and also a theological explanation for why they had been deserted by their civic gods (shadows of 9/11). Even though Socrates was largely traditional in his own religious beliefs as far as they are known, his relentless skepticism was provoking and irritating, and Dodds proposes that the citizens were right to decry his influence on callow students who might not have had as firm a moral grounding and take skepticism to unhealthy, nihilistic lengths. Dodds points out that Socrates was far from the only person persecuted for blasphemy and disbelief at this time, after heresy was outlawed circa 432 BCE. Others were Anaxagoras, Diagoras, and Protagoras, and, Dodds speculates, possibly Euripides as well.

Dodds spends his final chapter (entitled "Fear of Freedom") on the fate of rationalist philosophy after the high point of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle (not to mention Eratosthenes, Archimedes, and Hipparchus). What caused the slow and tortuous decline in knowlege and philosophy, leavened only by a few bright spots like Plutarch and Plotinus, culminating in almost complete retreat into magic, astrology, alchemy and supernaturalism through the dark ages? Was the culture of Rome the problem, or economic factors, or other cultural currents in Hellenism?

To understand the reasons for this long-drawn-out decline is one of the major problems of world history. We are concerned here with only one aspect of it, what may be called for convenience the Return of the Irrational.

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Other scholars have emphasized the internal breakdown of Greek rationalism. It "wasted away," says Nilsson, "as a fire burns itself out for lack of fuel. While science ended in fruitless logomachies and soulless compilations, the religious will to believe got fresh vitality." As Festugière puts it, "on avait trop discuté, on était las des mots. Il ne restait que la technique." To a modern ear the description has a familiar and disquieting ring, but there is much ancient evidence to support it. If we go on to ask why fresh fuel was lacking, the answer of both authors is the old one, that Greek science had failed to develop the experimental method.

Dodds then flatters Marx with some respect for the economic theory that it was slavery that insulated Greek intellectuals from the need to seriously engage in practical or applied science, which is to say, in technology, which was the missing motivation for developing the experimental method as a matter of doctrine and practice. Greek intellectuals remained for the most part content to be deductive and philosphical. But then says:

I find it hard to be certain that their religious outlook would have been fundamentally different even if some scientist had changed their economic lives by inventing the steam engine.

If future historians are to reach a more complete explanation of what happened, I think that, without ignoring either the intellectual or the economic factor, they will have to take account of another sort of motive, less conscious and less tidily rational. I have already suggested that behind the acceptance of astral determinism there lay, among other things, the fear of freedom- the unconscious flight from the heavy burden of individual choice which an open society lays upon its members. If such a motive is accepted as a vera causa (and there is pretty strong evidence that it is vera causa to-day), we may suspect its operation in a good many places. We may suspect it in the hardening of philosophical speculation into quasi-religious dogma which provided the individual with an unchanging rule of life; in dread of inconvenient research expressed even by a Cleanthes or an Epicurus; later, and on a more popular level, in the demand for a prophet or a scripture; and more generally, in the pathetic reverence for the written word characteristic of late Roman and mediaeval times- a readiness, as Nock puts it, "to accept statements because they were in books, or even because they were said to be in books."

I'd disagree a bit, because as Dodds portrays throughout the book and alludes to in connection with his ambient time, a flight from freedom/rationalism is perennial in the human condition. Atheism is repugnant not because it is false, but because it is true- it puts the human in a mature relationship with himself and his surroundings, neither subject to its mysterious demonic meddling, nor able to buy favors with propitiating offerings and occult thoughts. It represents an achievement of consciousness over unconscious longings and fixations. This supreme achievement, (or dry disenchantment), which can also be called freedom, is existentially bewildering and uncomfortable. Humanity's emotional language is anything but dry and maturely objective, however. In any age, it takes work and dedicated cultivation to maintain rationalism.

In our own age, the position of science is secure not because of its congeniality or due to alterations in human nature, but entirely because of its successes both theoretical and applied. If science had not afforded the United States the most productive agriculture, the most remarkable conveniences via electrification and now the internet, and the most awesome weapons ever deployed to kill our fellows, its position would hardly be so culturally secure. Each success has created further impetus for education and increased appreciation for the gifts of rationalism. But its counterpart is never far behind, ready to take the field when an academic discipline (think philosophy, English, subatomic physics) reaches such esoteric heights that, whether it has actually lost its rational way or not, it has lost popular rapport if the general educational system fails to keep up.

Creationism is a small example of this dynamic. Few phenomena are better attested than evolution, yet its dry and mechanistic implications for origin myths and the nature of humanity itself are so contrary to our narcissism (image of God, indeed!), that without a thorough commitment to intellectual integrity, people won't buy it (or won't buy it in its entirety- see even the new director of the NIH).

Not for naught do "Muslim" and "Islam" mean subservience- submission to god, to patriarchy, to the status quo, to the theological and political leadership of the so-called scholars and Imams, and to a confused and repugnant text. Such an antithesis of freedom is deeply comforting to innumerable people, not only Muslims.

• More work by E. R. Dodds
• Searle writes about postmodernism, relativism, and its own whacky version of freedom- freedom from facts.
• Fascinating RadioLab episode on parasites... check out the toxoplasma segment at the end.
• Disturbing compilation of our commitments in Afghanistan.
• Tom Tomorrow does health insurance.
• Incredible assignment of blame from a former Lehman employee. As though she and her own company bore no guilt for its own bankruptcy. Caveat laboris!
• A source of all that wingnut Beck-sterism, to the right of the Birchers.
• TARP and the Bush White House
• Tempest among the local captive oysters. Note however, that Corey Goodman, while an all-around super-smart guy, is a molecular biologist, not an ecologist with any kind of expertise on oyster or marine habitats.
• Excellent macro-analysis of oil and the future.

Postscript: A very simple concept seems to have been lost in the current health insurance debate, and that is whether insurers should have the right to refuse insurance to anyone. Obama's speech indicated a willingness to set up "high risk pools" as per John McCain. This only makes sense if insurers have the right of refusal (or right to price policies differently) to clients, based on any metric other than ability to pay. I think insurers should have no such right. They should compete on uniform price and on plan features over the minimum- that's it. Here is an interesting view of the debate from inside corporate PR.

Oyster Cloister

Oysters like to live in dense, complex, and silent comunities. Who knew?

Oysters have virtually vanished from the eastern seaboard, and numerous attempts at restoration and reintroduction have come to naught. The Chesapeake Bay, among many others, was once carpeted with reefs of oysters, cleaning the water and supplying abundant food to Native Americans and later to European settlers and townspeople. Technology allowed increasingly intensive removal, culminating in "power dredging", which strips the bay bed clean of ... pretty much everything.

Who would have suspected that oysters might not like to be dredged across time and time again, until nothing was left on the bottom to hang on to, but a slurry of silt and muck? Who would have guessed that "conditioning" the bay bottom by repeated dredging might not make it so great for the object of all that dredging ... the oyster?

The short-sightedness of man knows no bounds, especially when motivated by hunger and greed, and when the damage takes decades or even centuries to fully play out. But here we are, with species after species of bay and sea life fished out and stocks even in the supposedly limitless open ocean declining precipitously, or responding to fishing pressure by demographic collapse and selection for smaller adult sizes, among other issues. Whole ecosystems are being deranged. But the sea is the ultimate locus out-of-sight, out-of-mind. A ground-breaking paper some years ago outlined the full historical horror of what has happened to ecosystems that we so casually call "fisheries" (please contact me for the full paper if interested).

Getting back to oysters, a more recent paper demonstrates that oyster reefs can be brought back to vibrant and healthy condition within three years by the simple expedients of not dredging or killing them and of giving them a shoal-like bed of shells to live on. Here we are in the new millenium, having put a man on the moon, espied the smallest substituents of the atom and the farthest reaches of the cosmos and time, and it takes a major academic effort, published in the highest-profile journal in the world, to tell us that oysters thrive if they are given half a chance in a decent habitat? The paper proudly trumpets its success in its title: "Unprecedented restoration of a native oyster metapopulation". They even film their "happy" oysters blowing smoke rings!

Forgive my scoffing attitude, but while it certainly is good to hear about this triumph of oyster restoration (185 million oysters growing over 35 hectares = 86 acres, or 0.14 sq mile, equivalent to ~50 oysters per square foot), it also shows how blinkered and timid the fisheries-associated academy has become. (Here in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers.) Previous attempts at restoration apparently only used the naked bay floor as previously "conditioned" by the oyster dredgers, on which researchers seeded juvenile oysters, (called sprats), only to watch them succumb to disease and siltation/suffocation.

Here on the West coast, we have similar problems, including a decided lack of oysters. Our salmon runs are defunct or in freefall, after many decades of overexploitation, damming, and water diversion. California's central valley has been sucked dry and turned into a cesspool that will shortly be reversing flow and getting saline floodwater from the San Francisco Bay and ocean, due to our endless need for water, diking, dredging, as well as climate change-related draught. If we are to overpopulate the world, we should at least do so with a little consideration and foresight.

So, spare a thought for the lesser beings and the wild beauty of our world. Don't eat seafood.

Market medicine, II

The Atlantic carries a provocative article on health care reform. And Frontline does too.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Atul Gawande's diagnosis of what ails US health care and makes it more expensive than it needs to be. This week, I extend this analysis, reviewing two more sources, one an Atlantic monthly article by David Goldhill oriented towards laissez-faire solutions, and the other a Frontline documentary by T.R. Reid on how other advanced countries provide insurance.

There are some positive points to Goldhill's piece. He concludes, as I did in my post, that individuals are not really the consumers in our current system. Insurance pays doctors for procedures done, and doctors order procedures based on what they need, either on behalf of patients, or to keep their practices healthy. He connects this incentive system to observations about the shoddiness of care- that hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths take place annually in the US medical system because patients are not the primary customer. Indeed, one might make the case that a hospital-acquired infection, for instance, is found money for the hospital- a new revenue stream, whatever the outcome. And, because costs are carefuly shuffled around or hidden from all the players, little discipline occurs, either to keep profits in check, or to restrict overall health costs.

He also makes a decent case that our current system is the worst of all worlds, worse than either extreme of single-payer care or complete market-based care, with neither the cost discipline of fully market solutions, nor with the regulatory discipline of a single-payer system. Goldhill's solution would be to radically alter the system towards fully market incentives requiring each individual to generate a kitty (much like a 401k) from which to pay for routine, minor, and elective care, with catastrophic care covered uniformly by separate insurance.

Goldhill's prescription seems abhorrent. And it is not surprising that no other country with the means to provide decent health care has opted for such a system. He recommends a single-payer program for catastrophic health events, (to be defined by regulation of some kind), with premiums adjusted by age alone. But why not charge everyone the same? Why stick enormous premiums to the aged, due to their imminent need for catastrophic care? And how would catastrophic care be defined? He suggests 50K in cost, which would create incentives for providers to charge more for care in many instances, not less.

Secondly, Goldhill's personal heath account is to be used for end-of-life care, among many other things, and be bequethable to children, thus setting up just the kind of pro-euthanasia and pro-suicide incentive for the elderly that sounds like a recipe for ethical disaster. There are countless other problems of this kind in the details of his system. One's faith in the abililty of US consumers, in a completely free market system, to drive the core health system to higher quality and performance is shaken by the diet and plastic surgery industries. (Think of Herbalife!) Here is an industry where the assymetry of information, which Goldhill makes much of, is so severe that one has to be extremely careful about touting pure market mechanisms.

And utility is of course not the only issue at stake. Health care is a special kind of good, which we expect to get in the form of "care", not customer service. As a society, we have the feeling (in our better moments) that health care is a right akin to a human right- a fundamental decency by which we recognize our common humanity and vulnerability to fate in its most acute manifestations. It is not a game or a matter of competition, but of solidarity. Additionally, health is not a solely private good. Treatment of communicable diseases as well as mental health and substance abuse problems benefits society at large, often as much as it benefits the direct recipient. We are not only our brother's keeper, but his beneficiary as well.

So one way to make our society better will be listen to Goldberg's lament, but go in the opposite direction, towards a health insurance system that covers everyone (even illegal immigrants), minimizes monetary issues, and uses competition sparingly as needed to make the system more effective as well as more efficient. Currently competition is allowed to take numerous unconscionable and destructive forms, like cherry-picking those who apply for insurance and charging them for involuntary conditions (like age, sex, birth defects, etc.), or like denying care once charges have been rung up, or .. well, the horror stories of the current system are well known.

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On the other hand, Reid's analysis was far more interesting. Other countries, like Taiwan, Switzerland, Japan, England, and Germany all have excellent systems, each with specific issues, but none with our toxic mix of uncontrolled costs, crazy incentives, and worst-in-class health outcomes. If we picked any one of them, we would be better off, and probably better also than the proposals wending their way through Congress.

The common themes of these systems is that competition is allowed in certain beneficial ways, but not in non-beneficial ways. No one can be denied insurance (indeed all must have insurance), it is easy to switch insurance (when it is not single-payer), and insurance is subsidized for the poor. No one goes bankrupt for health reasons, period. Insurance is uniformly priced, not priced by how much health care one is thought to need (the antithesis of insurance, actually). But competition does happen. Carriers compete on how fast they pay claims, or on extra features of their plans over and above the uniform basic coverage. In England, hospitals and providers are now competing by popularity. Each provider gets paid uniformly per client or per procedure by the government, but those that can not attract customers face reduction or elimination.

Many of these countries still have a system with non-government insurers. So the "public option" being discussed in the US is not essential, unless one wants to move to a single-payer system (which would not be bad either, as shown by Britain). The main thing is to regulate the industry in a thorough way that makes its incentives beneficial for society instead of destructive. In Switzerland, which only reformed its health insurance system in 1994, most insurers are non-profit but private. They play by a new set of rules, do quite well, and can feel good doing so.

Is there rationing? Yes, indeed there is. Germany and Japan limit payments to doctors. Taiwan sets overall limits on the health budget in relation to GDP, has a single-payer, electronic smart card payment system that simplifies billing and holds the user's medical record, as well as enforcing prices on care. And also conducts "meetings" with people who rack up excessive visits, to resolve issues of hypochondria and loneliness. Is our rationing any better? It certainly is not driving prices down. But it is restricting care- from the 40 million-odd citizens who have no insurance, to those who depend on which employer they happen to work for, whether miserly or generous, and beyond that on how rapacious the employer's chosen insurer is- how willing to obey the current market by evading its ethical responsibilities.

This general regulatory argument is true for other areas of regulation, like finance and politics. On Wall Street, we have toxic incentive systems that value short-term profits and "optics" (not to mention insider information) over the long-term health of companies and thus also of the economy as a whole. In Washington, corporations are allowed to spend freely to make their voices heard and elect favored politicians, under the toxic theory that corporations have free speech rights and citizenship rights just like any other fictitious "person". Perhaps they deserve votes in proportion to their wealth as well!

The health care system is an area where we should value societal solidarity and decency over ideological fixation and mirages of theoretical utility (especially now that the specter of communism is such a withered ghost). We know what works, because health care in comparable countries works. We just need the courage to get from here to there. In all honesty, this isn't rocket science. Compared to the challenges of climate change and re-engineering our cultural energy metabolism, it is downright trivial. Or would be if Washington were not mired in short-sighted corporate corruption.

• One more lament on our current system, by Nicholas Kristof.
• Kristof, again, on socialized firefighting.
• Goldhill's system occurs in India, and serves the well-to-do pretty well.
• Krugman on our dysfunctional politics.
• Fed review offers very insightful diagnosis of the euphoria and its regulation
• Some basic business economics, focusing on IBM.
• Fascinating essay on the art of mathematics
• What is the honor in honor killing?
• Is the US embassy in Afghanistan protected and fit for use?
• Praying for death?
• Praying for ... sanity?
• Religion in a denuded world?

Jung and the fairy tale

A brief review of Jung and applications of his ideas

I'm a big fan of Carl Jung, twentieth century psychologist and head of a movement twinned with, and in internecine conflict with, Freud and the Freudians. The latter call themselves psychoanalysts, and the former, analytical psychologists! There are places Jung goes where I can't follow- he was a bit mystical at times, positing a new physical principle of reality (synchronicity), and maintaining a perpetual ambivalence whether religion was purely psychological, or whether his psychology touched on transcendent dimensions, indeed even put us in touch with God.

Like a true prophet, Jung's output was prodigous (22 volumes of collected works) and wildly uneven. Reading through even his best work, one is struck by a regular cycling between lucidity and obscure meandering. At his best, he is penetrating and eminently quotable. His therapeutic system offers a kind of salvation, which he termed individuation, that accomplishes the full flowering and maturation of human potential by coming to a balanced tension between the various poles of our psychic existence- conscious/unconscious, light/dark, male/female, etc. Getting there involves dredging up unconscious contents arriving through dreams and other avenues, and the involvement of the therapist in a sort of chiropractic realignment / inspired interpretation of those contents.

Noll's "The Jung cult" recounts even darker sides to Jung's life and legacy, and is on my reading list. But all that said, (and I'm no expert), I also find a great deal of good in his approach, including, in his more sane moments, a thoroughly psychological theory of religion as a sort of art form, and an appreciation of the spiritual impulses of humanity that, while irremediably supernatural in their psychological expression, have no supernatural origin. Jung was not really doing science, (at best, a sort of pre-science), but was developing a language to describe the psyche and its dynamics, drawing shamelessly on the mythologies and symbologies of countless other traditions, ancient and modern.

Along with Freud and many others, Jung thought that simply bringing unconscious contents to light is enough to set us free, like the gnostic theme of redemption by knowledge so common in mystical religion (not to mention modern science!). But what is in the unconscious was not just the nasty repressed stuff that Freud was so fixated on, but also beautiful, positive and powerful messages and themes that have healing power for a psyche out of balance. That is to say, it holds the fundaments of *meaning and of religion in all its senses, positive and negative. Jung also presented the idea that the unconscious provides a sort of counter-weight or corrective to the conscious stance, which can lead to harmony if only we listen to it. The phenomenon of PTSD might make one leary of such simplicity, but in the hands of positive cultivators and interpreters, a great deal of good can come out of such engagement with products of the imagination.

Though the psychological movements might partake in some ways of the forms of religion, their real significance is that they give us tools to understand all religion, and much else besides. Thus Jungianism might be termed a meta-religion, since, much like his student Joseph Campbell's work on myth, it works to lay bare the psychological, typically symbolic, language underlying the expression of human meaning in the arts and in the allied forms we call myth and religion. "Lay bare" might be putting it a bit too strongly. Perhaps it is better to say that Campbell and Jung used the kaleidoscopic range of its specific expressions to talk about the contents and dynamics of the unconscious (as did Campbell's student George Lucas). My view is that this work will re-emerge with time as cognitive science develops deeper understandings of mental function from a more reductionistic direction.

The foundation of Jung's system was an appreciation of the unconscious as a huge and deep edifice, with which consciousness is in constant dialog and tension. The layers range from simple cultural indoctrination to the deepest instincts like fear of snakes and other phylogenetically ancient patterns. These patterns, consituting an internal cosmos of sorts, are accessible or spontaneously expressed to different degrees, from Freudian slips to art, religion, and dreams. Whether dream content is meaningful is hugely controversial, and I don't take a firm position. But its imagery is very suggestive of messages with coded symbolic meaning, which have from ancient times been treated with high respect. Even if they lack intrinsic meaning, dreams are rich objects of interpretation, like vivid Rorschach blots that might be bent to positive or negative meaning, given one's frame of interpretation, itself the product of unconscious and social influences.

At any rate, the unconscious at its most lucid seems to speak in symbols and feelings, not in prose. Thus the arts are filled with symbolism and raw emotion, not to drive college students crazy with their layered lapidary depths, but to express the inner reaches of human nature. Included in the arts should be such pre-sciences as alchemy and astrology, with their incredibly symbol-rich, if data-poor, systems of thought. The iconoclasm of modern art has been a remarkable proof (in the breach) of this rule. We now miss the gargoyles of architecture, the warmth of representational painting, and the rhymes of lyric poetry. But we can not have them back, because they would betray too much of our humanity, which modernism has repressed after coming into such startling contact with its depths through the wars and psychological insights of the twentieth century. It would now be too naive, obvious, unironic, unrefined, and simplistic!

Religion also has felt the brunt of this modernist repression, where logic forbids giving in to superstition, however deeply felt and inescapable from a psychological perspective. So, we have to go back in time to find truly rich representations of unconscious currents- to Homer, to the romatic poets, to Raphael, to pre-modern art of all kinds.

One of the most interesting and perhaps surprising sources of unconscious contents in their most pure and concentrated form are fairy tales, such as those collected by the brothers Grim. I am working here (in extremely crude outline) from a set of podcasts by a Jungian therapist in Vancouver, John Betts. His segments on temperament/typology and individuation were relatively weak, but his segments on the interpretation of fairy tales were outstanding. He treated the tale "The Nixie of the mill-pond".

Fairy tales take place no where in particular, and no time in particular. Their characters are undeveloped and undetailed, existing only to further an archetypal story. Which is to say, a story consisting of themes and symbols all of unconscious significance. What details they do have are clearly symbolic, not realistic. Fairy tales have a superficial simplicity, yet are uncannily gripping and durable, being products of a long cultural process of pruning and selection. Their meaning is subtle and not obvious, but their lessons stay with us, because they speak to the inner self. Incidentally, they are ideally suited to the animated cartoon format, with non-realistic art matching their non-realistic content.

The drama of a fairy tale is one of individual psychological development, portrayed in an unrelenting stream of symbols- in this case, the pond, the golden comb, the moon, the old wise woman, the three heroic tasks, the magical flute, circumambulation, people turning into frogs. And on and on. The tale is told as a loosely connected set of symbols, which in this case have a strongly feminine tone (moon, flute, spinning wheel, sheep, crone, roe deer). Thus it seems that this tale, though its ostensible main characters are the miller and his son, is about their relationship to the feminine principle, embodied in the Nixi (a kind of powerful water-sprite, such as the Rhine-maidens of Wagner), and the son's wife.

The Nixie takes possession of the son in consummation of a deal the miller made with her after losing touch with his own psychological foundations (represented by a run of bad luck, a sort of midlife crisis). Enduring severe magical and heroic tests (whose solutions are communicated to her through a set of dreams), the son's wife saves him from the clutches of the Nixie by giving the Nixie a series of symbols of femininity, only to lose him again to years of amnesia. But the flute ultimately reminds each of them of their true natures (gnosis), after which they live united, happily ever after.

It may be possible to put other, more mundane interpretations on fairy tales. But to me the symbolic and psychodynamic interpretation, as a sort of waking dream with deeply psychological dilemmas and resolutions, seems far and away the best, plumbing the depths of the tale's dynamics, and explaining its power and meaning, expecially to those who are young and more psychologically open than adults. The reason why we treasure tales of psychological development and fulfillment, which are of course also the bread and butter of all kinds of narrative art- novels, sitcoms, cartoons, and films- is that this is what we seek in our own lives- not just material sustenance and success, but personal meaning found through the trials and tribulations of life.

• Arch-Freudian Edward Glover spits invective at Jung in 1953: "What sexuality is to Freud the number four is to Jung." (Jung was into numerology along with everything else mythic).
• Freud and religion
• Is peak oil a mirage? That would, frankly, be a terrible situation for the climate. And I doubt the rosy scenarios depicted here. US oil production continues to decline, despite all the technological wizardry.
• Gosh- whatever happened to IBM?
• Whence morality?

Wish upon a star

Review of Eric Reitan's "Is God a delusion?"

Thanks to the local Catholic library, I got the opportunity to read philosopher Eric Reitan's book, Is God a Delusion? (a reply to religion's cultured despisers). Finely written and extremely temperate and sincere in its impulses, it marshals a variety of arguments against Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and its ilk. (In fairness, I'll note that of these new atheist books, I have read only Dennett's, and didn't like it much.) I apologize for the length of this review, but the book was remarkably pleasant to read and interesting to engage with, in marked contrast to other books in the field. I recommend it highly, while disagreeing with it extensively.

Chapter one takes us through the obligatory "What, me?!" defense. If I may paraphrase... Dawkins's target is not recognizable as my religion or my God. My religion is very liberal, even mystical. God is good and has nothing to do with hell. Indeed, here in Oklahoma, I have to drive my family an hour just to get to a church I like (take that, God's creation!). Thus, not only is Dawkins completely wrong, but most Christians in America are wrong too. I'd even say they aren't truly religious! (Take that, fundamentalist heretics!)

(Me again...) What this demonstrates most directly is that, going by the numbers, Dawkins hits the nail of popular religion far better than does Reitan. It also is a fine example of how no one really knows what they are talking about when they talk about God. Which might lead a skeptic to a very simple conclusion- that it doesn't exist.

Chapter two extends the discussion of what God is. Dawkins is apparently mistaken in positing that God is complex. Anselm told us that God is simple. Thus for Reitan God is simple, despite his creating the universe and all the creatures, being all-seeing and all-knowing, listening to all our prayers, contacting us through schizoid experiences, and blogging on the side through more or less exemplary prophets. Now Reitan disavows most of these properties imputed to God (though his God remains personal by mystical contact), but he is not clear which ones. Does he believe the Bible to be completely human in origin, or semi-inspired? Being against inerrantism (as he is, vociferously) is all very well, but then what, if any, of scripture is sound or reflective of God at all? This utterly arbitrary theological approach to God simply reinforces the theme of Chapter one, indicating that no one knows the least thing about it, once again leading the skeptical observer to the hypothesis that ... it may very well not exist.

In this chapter (and continuing on through chapter three), Reitan also arrives at his own definition: "'God' names that which, in our intuitions and numinous visions, suggests that our ethico-religious hope is not in vain." As a specimen of wishful thinking, one could hardly do better. There is nothing objective even proffered. Whatever we think is good, there is God. Whatever we think not so good, (like much of the Old Testament), there God is not. This turns God into a totem of liberal do-goodism and feel-goodism, which as an atheist I entirely understand and applaud, but which surely must make serious religious believers feel rather adrift, if not hostile.

So why is God believable when there is no serious evidence, a complete lack of knowledge, an extremely tenuous definition at variance with common belief, and psychological clues aplenty to its very human origin? Chapter four delves into the unique scope of the God hypothesis- that since it presumes to run the whole universe and exist outside and prior to it (i.e. it is transcendant), it is more believable than your garden-variety undisprovable celestial teapot and its many mocking colleagues. In big lie parlance, the very size of the lie should inspire respect, if not awe and belief. (I'll treat transcendence more directly below.)

This chapter also offers a minor God-in-the-gaps argument from chance events like quantum indeterminacy- that possibly the transcendent realm may interface with ours through non-random twiddles, applicable both to our souls, through brain effects, and perhaps to other worldly effects. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, when physicists say "random", they mean it. Really random, not pseudorandom. If random events, such as matter spontaneously coming out of the vacuum and going back in, were twiddled by God, it would leave traces of lack of conservation of energy/mass/information, which have not been observed. Much like the other gap arguments that occupy the rest of the book, this one is not strong, and is also susceptible to progressive gap closure by way of continuing observation and study. Reitan even spends a paragraph on why it is not a gap argument, because it accepts current science rather than exploiting a gap in understanding. Yet current science not only finds quantum indeterminacy, but also deals with its predictably random consequences, expressed quantitatively in probability distributions rather than in, say, occasional biasses towards prayed-for outcomes.

Chapter five really gets Reitan's blood going, impeaching Dawkins for not reading Aquinas's Summa Theologica. But Reitan himself devotes only a few pages to the issue, and does not have very good things to say about its arguments either (aside from the basic cosmological argument, dealt with below), so it is unclear why the supporting material would be terribly helpful. He is certainly right that Dawkins misunderstood Aquinas, (using web resources to do so!), but if his many later sympathetic interpreters thought so little (or could make so little) of Aquinas's arguments, then it is not clear why Dawkins needs to go the extra mile here. Biologists are not against reading Darwin, for instance, but we strongly recommend the profusion of more modern treatments first, since they both present the arguments more efficiently, and benefit from later developments in data and theory. Doesn't theology progress in similar fashion?

Gaps

Reitan's core arguments (chapters 6, 7, 8) boil down to two, which are first the cosmological argument, and second, the argument from mysticism. To put it extremely briefly, these are both God-in-the-gaps arguments, offering the possibility, or "hope", of God in what currently remain as the two prime mysteries of our universe. But these mysteries are mysterious to quite different degrees.

The bare cosmological argument says that the origin of our universe has no good explanation as yet, and might as well be due to some super-being creator as to a multiverse, an odd vacuum fluctuation, or the super-string tango of more regular speculative physics. That we really don't know is hardly in dispute. This classic deism, very common among the founders of the United States, has no terribly strong arguments against it, positing a clockwork universe that was set in motion by this marvelous Being, continuing unmolested to the present day. While such a system may be benevolent in the most distant and ultimate sense, it is hardly a source of personal hope to wish upon.

It has no terribly strong arguments for it either, of course, since as Hume pointed out most trenchantly, the origin of this deity would be itself a mystery to be solved, it being simply unacceptable to wave it away with the classic theological mantras of the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, the self-sufficient being, and so forth. At any rate, if evidence (better than the so-called "proofs" of Anselm and Aquinas) crops up on the matter, I'll be the first to pay attention.

Deism also offers no support for the florid fixations of popular religion, such as hell, the answering of prayers, the enjoyment of sacrifices, and the twiddling with evolution, tribal politics, international relations, the weather, and so forth (which Reitan decries with some passion as well, going so far as to state a preference for the astringent nullity of atheism over the absurd elaborations of fundamentalism and of orthodox theology more generally). One can't even responsibly call this originating cause a "Being" to invoke anthropomorphic shades, as Reitan habitually does- it might be something like the electron, or other ur-particle or force field. One look through a telescope indicates the extreme improbability that we humans have any special place in this deity's massive work, unless that deity be embarrassingly inefficient, slow, and wasteful, as it has been all over again in the wantonly brutal process of evolution here on earth. Deism appears to be the thinnest of theological gruel.

Mind

The other great mystery of the universe is that of the human mind and particularly the personal mystical experience. Here Reitan really hangs his hat, drawing on Simone Weil, William James, and Friedrich Schleiermacher for support. However, as gaps go, this one is narrow and getting narrower all the time. Already in James's time, he concluded that there really was no way to intellectually defend religion- that it arises from feelings first, with intellectual theology added for ornamentation. And secondly, various mystical experiences, while not routinely explicable, were close enough to the common run of mental deviations and defects that these also were scant grounds for belief, whether citing the experiences of others or one's own.

James ended up with a wan and labored decision, eked out with little conviction, that he could in some good conscience hold to an unjustified and uncompelled "over-belief" in Christian theism to keep himself sane and happy (and in his academic and social positions, one might add).

Schleiermacher, a hundred years before James, similarly founded theism on the bare religious feeling, which Reitan agrees with and likens to the Einsteinian position of simple awe and wonder. However, Schleiermacher had fewer doubts that this all somehow adds up to Christianity, even in the teeth of his own generation of atheist "despisers" and the perennial problems of the very same impulse finding expression the world over in fundamentally different theologies and Gods. Reitan's hope rests here, in the end, that these experiences, the fundament of religious feeling, mean what we think they mean, instead of being bare emotions, conveniently interpreted through the lenses of indoctrination.

In our time, the brain is a highly contested space, poked and prodded with some disregard for its sacredness, not to say for propriety. Its operations are fundamentally bounded by materialistic theory as far as the scientists involved in its study are concerned, and thus it is an ever more unlikely source of transgressive and revelatory contact with the "other side", transcendent reality, or God. That is not to say that it can't feel that way- who hasn't done a few too many mushrooms from time to time? But no objective sign has yet emerged that the mystical experience connects with anything other than our internal psychological depths.

But Reitan sticks with Schleiermacher, and claims:

"At the root of our experience, in our awareness of our own existence, there is a seminal awareness of a transcendent reality upon which our entire being depends.

...

when we do, [notice it], why should we doubt its veridicality any more than we doubt our other feelings? When we don't doubt it and focus our attention on its object, a rich vista of insight opens up as surely as when a scientist trusts her senses and begins to explore the empirical world."

pp 161-162

Where to start? Whether most people experience a seminal awareness is open to question, but that it reflects a transcendent "reality" (rather than just seems that way) is even more open to question. To go with Descartes, I think therefore I am. Thus if I no longer think, I no longer am, implying directly that my ability to think lies at the heart of my being. Whether my ability to think is mechanical or partakes of the divine, the dependence is the same, and thus for me as a thinking being, whatever founds my ability to think and experience will seem/feel equally transcendent, however mundane its actual workings.

This is the crux of the issue- that the feeling of transcendence can not say anything about the nature of that transcendence. As I view current cognitive science, which is hastening to complete the anti-narcissist revolutions of the enlightenment which removed humans successively from the center of the solar system, from their divine pedestal above biology, from the center of the universe, and even from the sovereignty of our own minds, the workings of the mind give every (objective) evidence of being astounding, remarkable, and incredibly intricate, but also entirely material.

There is also every reason to directly doubt the veridicality of spiritual feelings and their content. Not that they don't exist or feel powerful, but that they imply the reality of culturally entrained concepts such as Christ, God, Allah, the creator of the universe, Bodhisattvas, or other such notions. Human history is littered with claims of great "insights", even seminal insights, that descended on recipients of such experiences. At best such insights amount to love, which is ever in short supply, but not a novel idea. Other examples include such horrors as the Book of Revelations, which we can all be thankful was far, far, far from veridical. No instance has granted insights that could not have come from the dreams and thoughts of the subject. Personally, I see great artistry in such visions, like those of Hildegard, and we should give their originators their due as creative geniuses, whether willing or unwilling. But as does all art, they plumb the inner psychological depths of humanity, not the parameters of the universe.

Lastly from the quote above, if focusing on such mystical objects leads as surely to insight as does engagement with the empirical world, then why has their objective return been so paltry (as opposed to their artistic return)? The simplest reason is that Reitan's claim is incorrect. Indeed, it is slandering scientists to liken their "trusting of her senses" to faith in spiritual impressions from religious experiences. Scientists do not trust their senses- they calibrate them, they double-check them, they invent new ones to take the place of our built-in unreliable and limited ones. They critique relentlessly, based on evidence coming from all possible calibrated senses. Whatever the scientific method is, it is first and foremost a matter of psychological insight, about our gullibility and suggestibility. Trust gets science nowhere, and nowhere is trust less merited than in issues of "faith" and mystical emotion.

Transcendence

There is fascinating formal relation in this book, and in theism generally, between the transcendence invoked for brain functions and the transcendence invoked for the cosmos as a whole. Each are systems which theoretically must arise from external causes which can not be perceived by inside observers, leading to the label of "transcendent". (This follows, as Reitan explains, from the principle of sufficient reason, PSR, which I mostly agree with.)

In the case of the mind, glimmers of transcendent feeling are, to a naturalist and brain scientist, clearly the sense of, as Schleiermacher would put it, "absolute dependence", on the brain substrate, especially when whacked out of its nomal rut by hallucinogens or meditation, etc. Subjectively, minds are dependent on their substrate and can know nothing about that substrate from their internal perspective. In this case, however, there are two escape hatches- our senses are pointed outside the mind system, allowing some amount of external, self-observing perspective, and we live in a world of other brains which observe each other in increasing scientific detail. So this kind of transcendence is now not at all mysterious in principle, even if all its internal feelings (i.e. consciousness, mysticism) have not yet been fully demarcated from the outside perspective.

Likewise, the universe as a whole including energy, mass, space, and time itself, originated at a point, and thus has some cause of which we as yet know nothing, and about which it may well be impossible to know anything from our entirely inside vantage point. (Note that in the absence of time, the idea of causality itself may be problematic, which may have some impact on PSR, if one wants to be highly speculative.) Labelling this cause 'God' hardly does us much good. If we lived in a multiverse society of other universes which we could see and converse with, we might be able to figure out exactly what was going on, just as in the case of brains. But alas, that is not the case, and we probably have to settle for not knowing at all, whether we label that state ignorance or deism.

Hope

Reitan does not claim to argue for theism conclusively, but only to open a space for the philosophical acceptability of theistic belief, in view of the cosmic unknowns and the mystical experiences of life. If one wishes to stake one's beliefs on things unknown instead of known, then this is a theology with some attraction. But as the domain of the unknown dwindles, slowly but steadily over the years, it would seem to be an increasingly barren and isolated outpost.

The underlying project of the book, of course, is to preserve a sense of hope, religion being in the words of Marx, "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions". Hope and meaning are the inner resource by which we live, and atheists, with their smug intellect and heedless destruction of all that others hold sacred, are thus, even if right, enemies of humanity in this sense. (Unless religion is not, after all, our only hope.) Marx hoped that his worldly revolution would redeem us:

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

...

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower."

Unfortunately, communism failed utterly to cast off the chain of capitalist struggle and mundane existence, so our choice may well be between bearing the chain without flowers and bearing it with flowers. Philosophers should probably choose the former.

Chapter nine transitions to the "sell" part of the book, where the imagination tools (as the new agers here in Marin like to put it) get revved up in service of the Christian message. No longer is belief just putative or reasonable in the face of uncertainty. It is probable. And not only that, it is the only thing that stands between a horribly, unimaginably abused and destroyed person (Reitan provides grisly scenarios), and total despair.

Now, it escapes me why, just when the world has kicked a person in the teeth, Reitan would like to tell her that the world is, by his philosophy, intrinsically good and looking out for them. That would seem palid, even insulting. Perhaps this is a matter of temperament, or it may presume cultural indoctrination that also has little to do with truth or philosophy. At any rate, I would think that the hope we live by should have solid foundations- in us, as hoping beings doing good- not fantastical ones, pulled out of tenuous theological arguments. Reitan admits that theodicy- the resolution of evil- is not theology's strong point, yet by his narration it is also its main point, providing essential hope and sustenance against the evils that abound. In short, we end up where we began, swirling within an enormous exercise in wishful thinking.

Chapter ten makes a plea for the worth of organized religion as the leading way to integrate positive spiritual emotions with the negative ingroup-outgroup dynamic inherent in human nature and human communities. I agree fully both that divisiveness and xenophobia is perhaps humanity's leading defect, and that the spiritual/pan-empathic emotion is humanity's best and opposite emotion. It is ironic that Reitan is happy to trot out an evolutionary explanation for the former (with which I agree), but not for the latter, which Chimpanzees apparently experience as well. Since he takes the intuitive appearance of experience seriously for positive mysticism (as being "veridical"), then he should also accept reports in the vein of "the devil made me do it" for less positive emotions. But that would admit a dark deity, which is contrary to Reitan's wish/definition of God as all-good. Such imbalances pervade the book, despite its extremely sincere efforts to leaven its apologetics with an understanding and appreciation of the other side of the argument.

And not to put too fine a point on it, it is theology that transmutes the better emotions of love/agape into the worse emotions of group identity and competition, by devising fabulistic group-specific narratives and interpretations that harden into "truths", which one group "knows", and others don't, based on celebrity prophets and their lineages of interpreters. Reitan is well aware of this dynamic and offers only the most brief and personal endorsement of the Christian story with Jesus as its star as the best of all elaborations of the pan-empathic impulse (as did James and Schleiermacher before him). But why indulge in such preferences at all?

We feel drawn to symbols of the unseen and dimly understood inner life, and rightly treasure communal and artistic expressions of these deep currents, of which the spiritual/pan-empathic emotion is the very best. Reitan is correct to put prime emphasis in his theology on its source in dreams, visions, and mystical experiences- the personal transcendant function (or more simply, the unconscious). But it is mistaken to equate this with the cosmic transcendent function, firstly because we know nothing whatsoever about cosmic origins or of any remotely plausible connection between the two phenomena. And secondly because such vastly inflated and inflating claims feed the logically unbounded, grandiose, and divisive aspects of religion.

There was a time I used to reject those who where not of my faith. Now,

my heart has grown capable of taking on all forms.

A pasture for a gazelles, a convent for Christians.

A temple for idols, a Kaba for the pilgrim.

A table for the Torah, a book of the Koran.

My religion is love. Whichever the route love's

caravan shall take, that path shall be the path of my faith.

-Ibn Arabi

• Ruse follows Reitan on the middle way, but from the other side
• On brain cultivation
• The courage to be girls
• Moments of life
• Phineas Gage gets a face: a picture of the tragic neurology subject has recently been unearthed.
• BBC religion show treats neuroscience and the mystical experience
• Mr deity gives and gives [video]
• One way to stop big coal
• Nice talk by Francis Collins, introducing his directorship at NIH [video]
• Cosima reviews the mind & AI