ShrinkWrapped

Iraq Elections

I had planned to write about the distortion of language and memory that is coarsening out political discourse, but I have been overwhelmed by the Iraqi election results.  This is a clear win for the Iraqi people, for democracy, for hope, and not incidentally, a powerful endorsement of President Bush's policies and intestinal fortitude. 

In the face of threats from Zarqawi to have the streets of Baghdad run with the blood of voters, and the constant negativity of the media, the bravery of the Iraqis was inspirational.

Read this, from Iraq the Model:

Could any bravery match the Iraqis'!? Let the remaining tyrants of the world learn the lesson from this day.

The media is reporting only explosions and suicide attacks that killed and injured many Iraqis s far but this hasn't stopped the Iraqis from marching towards their voting stations with more determination. Iraqis have truly raced the sun.

I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
I put the paper in the box and with it, there were tears that I couldn't hold; I was trembling with joy and I felt like I wanted to hug the box but the supervisor smiled at me and said "brother, would you please move ahead, the people are waiting for their turn".

Bill Roggio summarizes the power of al Qaeda and the Arab Street:

The Counterterrorism Blog reports on the violence al Qaeda has taken credit for on Election Day. Behold the might of al Qaeda:
- At least four coordinated attacks on election centers in and around Baghdad - A rocket barrage fired at the protected Green Zone in Baghdad

- The destruction of a U.S. armored vehicle in Mosul

- The destruction of an Iraqi army Humvee with a large roadside bomb in Mosul

- Two separate mortar attacks on the same election center in the Wahdah neighborhood of Mosul

- A mortar and small arms attack on an election center in the Al-Nahrwan neighborhood of Mosul

- A small arms attack on the election center in the Andalusia neighborhood of Mosul

- A mortar attack on the election center in the Palestine neighborhood of Mosul.

- Various other alleged operations in Tel Afar, Ar-Ramadi, and the Diyala province

Fearsome, isn't it? Based on al Qaeda's prior statements, nothing short of a full out offensive should have been expected in Iraq on Election Day. Al Qaeda desired that the streets run red with blood of infidels, yet all al Qaeda could muster were minor skirmishes, a couple of destroyed vehicles, and a few rocket and mortar attacks.

Al Qaeda claims to be the voice of the Arab Street, the heart and souls of the Arab people, and the fist of Allah. The Iraqi Street believes otherwise, and showed up to vote in overwhelming numbers, despite the terror promised by al Qaeda and other terrorists groups.

Al Qaeda may be able to indiscriminately murder civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are impotent when it comes to influencing the establishment of democracy in these young nations. Their "power" can only be used to murder and maim innocents or create bluster-filled propaganda tapes, but they cannot influence the future of Iraq. The Iraqi people possess this power, and flexed it today.

The MSM continues to have difficulty seeing anything positive in Iraq, courtesy of Polipundit.

The Old York Times changed the caption on that photo. It used to be something like, “People gather outside a polling place in Sadr city as blood runs down a gutter after a mortar attack killed three people.” Now, it’s been changed to “A mortar attack at a polling station in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least three people.”

Hindrocket at Power Line quoted from  a New York Times article describing the manner in which the Arab media was reporting the elections and concluded:

Violence in the Arab world is a sadly familiar, dog-bites-man story. Even Al Jazeera couldn't escape the fact that the spread of freedom is the news of the day.

There is so much to be cautiously excited about, that my posting on language, memory and distortion will just have to wait for another day.

PRB

Vox Bloguli

Hugh Hewitt invited bloggers to comment on a quote from a Jonathan Rauch article.  I thought I might give it a try.

From Hugh:

The first Vox Blogoli of 2005 deals with a Jonathan Rauch piece from the new Atlantic (subscription required.)  Jonathan is a Yalie, a National Journal columnist, and the author of Gay Marriage.  A more complete bio is here.

Rauch writes in his piece the following:

“On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around.”

There are so many things wrong with this quote that it is difficult to know where to begin.  As someone who has been imbued in the liberal Democratic tradition for 30 years, and has (until the last 2+ years) read the New York Times every day, I can appreciate where Rauch is coming form.  There is a superficial similarity between the religious conservatives in the Republican party and the Michael Moore left in the Democratic party.  As I suggested in an earlier post, people are extremely skillful at using rationality to obfuscate and disguise hidden irrationality.  I believe the scribes and faces of the MSM and the professoriate are adept at this; in fact, their facility with language and their art in  using language (like the Red Queen) to mean what they say it means, is what got them their jobs in the first place.  However, closer examination shows the unacknowledged irrational underpinnings of the left as opposed to the acknowledged irrational underpinnings of the religious conservatives. Please note, I am not using “irrational” in a pejorative way; I am using it in the sense of a belief that is based on faith, as opposed to scientific validation.  The beliefs on the left (that the United States is the main source of instability and danger in the world today, that income needs to be redistributed in order to create equality, that Bush is Hitler and went to war for oil or to complete his father’s unfinished business, etc; see here for a more comprehensive list of current “creeping fascism” memes) are based on faith, not on factual evidence.  In fact, much of their agenda has been shown by history to be wrong.  The derivation of their beliefs is ultimately related to Marx’s dialectical view of history (although I suspect many on the left do not recognize this or believe it to be true) which divides the world into oppressors and victims based on the owners of the means of production versus the workers.  This is historically a very recent ideological develop, which has been shown to work poorly when it works at all.  More than a hundred years of failure should be enough for any experimental design. 

On the other hand, the religious conservative view has the advantage of having worked reasonably well as a system of thought and belief, for several thousand years.  Even if one were to grant that the Christian ethos went too far to the extremes in the past, certainly since the Renaissance, the Judeo-Christian ethic we are all heir to has worked quite well in improving conditions here on the earth. 

I would posit that when either extreme of left or right takes a prominent place in our polity, it presents serious dangers.  Democracy works essentially by summing the irrationalities of its citizenry in ways which tend to cancel out the most extreme manifestations.  When it works well, both parties move to the center and try to appeal to the broad, more rational middle.  This depends on a number of important factors, one of which is relatively unbiased information.  The founders recognized how important freedom of information was and codified freedom of the press.  Until Watergate and Viet Nam the press aspired, as part of their ethical core, to be objective.  Once they discovered how powerful they could be, by (in the thinking of the left on campuses and in press rooms) stopping a war and bringing down a President, all bets were off.  The press evolved into yet another power center, one with an overall objective (like all power centers) of perpetuating their power and exerting their influence.  It has become clear over the last 30 years, and crystal clear to all but the most myopic during the most recent election cycle, that the MSM has become allied with the left wing of Democratic party.  The MSM, of necessity, try opt move the "center" to the left.  (This is why all religious conservatives are depicted as "right-wing" in the New York Times, for example.)  The danger in this is that the Democrats are left either running stealthy campaigns, where they need to hide their agenda, or they are marginalized.  Since I believe we need a rational opposition party (no one should be foolish enough to ever expect a one party state to remain free for long) this is very troubling.

To those who claim that the religious conservatives are analogous to the Michael Moore left, I would respectfully suggest they do some reading.  While there was a time when the extreme right seemed to have found a place in the mainstream of the Republican party, the MSM made sure everyone was kept fully aware of the development (See  Goldwater, Barry, slogan: In your heart you know he’s right!  Liberal’s retort: In your guts, you know he’s nuts!)  Whether in fact Goldwater was the radical he was portrayed to be is another discussion, the point is that the electorate repudiated him in such a fashion that the Republican party was forced to renew itself, sharpen its thinking and finally come to fruition in Ronald Reagan 20 years later. 

It is not clear that the Democratic party has yet seen their 1964, and until they do, our political discourse is likely to be coarse and unenlightening.

Progressives and Totalitarianism: An Irrational Marriage

A few days ago I received a note from a friend and colleague (in the field of Mental Health) which contained all the favorite memes of the liberal, elite cognoscenti.  The e-mail was essentially a copy of a post, titled Fascism Anyone? by Lawrence Britt from the web site of the  Council for Secular Humanism.  It purports to be a logical disquisition on our ongoing descent into fascism.   The starting point is the author’s attempt to draw parallels between past instances of fascism and the current Administration of George W. Bush.

I will briefly summarize the post’s 14 points (with my humble editorial comments as asides):

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.… It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia. [Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, are good examples]

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights…. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation. Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, plus the Palestinians and al Qaeda are good examples]

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause…. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” [This is easy, everyone scapegoats the Jews, and the only ones who need to put “terrorists” in scare quotes are people who have trouble identifying those who specifically target non-combatant innocents as terrorists.]

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. [The last I saw, the military still had civilian leaders; you may not like Bush and Rumsfeld, but they are civilians.]

5. Rampant sexism…. these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses. [Since the Islamists want Shariah law, which is the law of the land in such enlightened places as Saudi Arabia, and Shariah values Muslim women as being worth half a Muslim male, and executes Homosexuals, this one is easy.]

6. A controlled mass media. [Al Jazeera, anyone?]

7. Obsession with national security. [9/11 will do that.]

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together…. A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion. [Again, the goal of al Qaeda, as well as the current status of Iran and Saudi Arabia, is an Islamic state under Shariah law.]

9. Power of corporations protected…. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens. [Most totalitarian states are ruled by small groups of corrupt elites; again see Iran and Saudi Arabia.]

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. [Last I heard strikes were still legal.]

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist. [In this country there is indeed minimal academic freedom; there are almost no Conservative voices in academia. 

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. [Pre liberation Iraq, perhaps,North Korea, Saudi Arabia.]

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. [Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the names start to repeat after a while, with some variation from time to time.]

14. Fraudulent elections. [Thus far, most election fraud has been linked to counties under Democratic control. Take a look at what has been going on in Washington's state governor’s race. Stefan Sharkansky at Sound Politics has been on top of this, with details.]

While I suggest you read the whole thing for yourself, it does seem to be a pretty good primer for understanding totalitarian states, all of which share some or all of these features. I would suggest that most of these features belong to al Qaeda, the countries in the Axis of Evil, the Palestinian terror groups like Hamas, Fatah (now know as the Yassar Arafat Brigades), Hezballah, and some additions like Saudi Arabia and Cuba. The country that appears to be most threatened with a slide into fascism today is Russia. (The European Union is in danger, admittedly with a much longer horizon, of descending into a bureaucratic erosion of individual rights that may, in time, become indistinguishable from fascism but that is for another day.) Putting the United States in the same company suggests that the writer of the article essentially has no idea what Fascism actually is. 

I briefly considered doing a thorough fisking of the note (which is long and semi-detailed, though it lacks any links to sources) but realized that this would be a completely vain attempt (for the Firefly fans out there, it would amount to River’s redacting of Book’s Bible, an attempt to impose rigor and logic to a system that is fundamentally about faith, not reason.) It lead me to ponder how bright, thoughtful people (among them many of my relatives and friends) can see fascism and the forwards march of fascism in the current setting, especially when our enemies are among the most vicious totalitarian nihilists we have ever faced. This doesn’t apply just here at home, but at the moment, the Europeans consider the US and Israel the greatest dangers world peace (I suppose, in a way they are right. If we would only surrender, we would have peace; bin Laden has said just that, explicitly, many times.) This brings me back to my current interests which I am attempting to explore in this blog. I have been trying to explain how people can deny unpleasant pieces of reality. As a Psychiatrist, I see this everyday in my practice, but it is also at work in almost every interaction between human beings. We remain rational creatures, just barely, by constantly reasserting our rationality over our irrationality; civilization depends on the balance of the rational out weighing the irrational; when the balance is upset (for example, when a state is taken over by a pseudo-scientific ideology which is deeply irrational) the state will inevitably fail. Since to the victims of totalitarianism, Fascism and Communism (and Islamism today) are indistinguishable, I thought I would use Communism, last century’s failed BIG IDEA, as my exemplar. Communism was based on a theoretical underpinning that denied human irrationality. Communism could only work if the basic tenet held, ie that men would love their fellow man if only they were not oppressed by the Capitalist overlords. If Communism were correct, then all that followed would have made sense. It would make perfect, rational, sense to remove from society those who were not capable of understanding this fundamental fact, of an innate, essential goodness. The early Communist true believers, to see them at their most idealistic, believed they were freeing people from oppression (and in their language, they persisted in claiming this well after it had become clear that so much of what they were doing was corrupt and oppressive); they were only seeking power over their fellow men because they needed power in order to usher in the Communist Utopia. Even if one could overlook the deaths of millions during the forced collectivizations and the rampant corruption of the body politic and loss of freedoms in the USSR, it became clearer and clearer to the citizens of the USSR and slowly even to the readers of the New York Times, that the USSR was a corrupt failure of a country. Precisely because people are, in ways that they almost always fail to recognize in themselves, irrational under their rational surface, any Utopian system is doomed to fail.  

When people do not recognize their own irrationality, their own hidden motivations, there is usually a good reason for this self deception; it is almost always based on poorly perceived threats to the self. 

I would argue that only a Democratic system has any hope of finding rational outcomes from the complex interplay of individual and group irrationality.  I will return to these topics when time permits.

January 17, 2005: Contrasts, Edges, and Differences

As part of one’s training a Psychoanalyst must go through his/her own Psychoanalysis.  While there have been many questions raised about whether or not Psychoanalysis is a Science, it is unquestionable that it is the closest state we have to a laboratory in which the patient (Analysand) can explore the machinations of his own psyche, complete with prejudices and unconscious biases.  The typical analysis lasts anywhere from 4-7 years; during their time together the Analyst cultivates a Zen like attitude of neutral curiosity.  Often caricatured as non-involvement (and sometimes, some Analysts do a terrific imitation of detachment) the Analyst must remain non-judgmental and curious about all facets of the patient’s mind.  Part of the work involves helping the patient develop a curious attitude about himself, and especially about his basic relationship with the world around him. This is not as simple as it sounds.  Patients, even patients who are desperately unhappy, who have had disaster after disaster in their work, or their relationships, have a powerful investment in maintaining their dysfunctional perspective.  Many patients (and many people in general) would much prefer to see themselves as victims of their hereditary and their Neurochemistry, rather than as agents of their own unhappiness.  All victims share some common features.  Whether you are a victim of your genetics, of your parents’ inadequate nurturing, or of the greater society, all victimization involves a feeling of helplessness.  Victims, by definition, are helpless.  It is extraordinarily difficult to make someone aware that their victimhood is all too often an active state, one that they unconsciously create.  Certainly, real victims do exist.  The victims of the tsunami are real.  Children who are being abused by parents or caretakers are truly helpless.  However, once the world is divided into victims and victimizers, all discourse ends.

The type of binary distinction I am writing about is, in some ways, hard wired into our systems.  Our nervous system, on the most fundamental level, is most sensitive to contrasts and edges, the distinction between one object and another, between the object and the background.  We have cells in the visual cortex which fire primarily when they “see” an edge.  Our visual cortex is organized in such a way as to enhance edges.  While one always has to be careful to avoid reductionism, contrasts and edges are fundamental organizers for the nervous system, and later, for the mind. The first awareness of an infant concerns the distinction between self and other.  (People who never develop a secure sense of their own self [ego] boundaries, are prone to the most severe types of psychiatric disorders, but that is a long discussion for another place and time.)  The child’s sense of individuality, self, emerges from the undifferentiated mother/child and the child’s first stirrings of self-hood are loudly announced by the youngster’s “NO!”  The self is heralded by negation of the other.  Later, the child learns to encompass other important people in their sense of community (father, siblings, relatives).  By the time the child is entering elementary school, he or she has begun to include others who share their various tribal affiliations as part of their group.  I am a member of my family, my extended family, my religious group, my school, my state, my country. Our tribal affiliations are more fluid the farther they are form the family.  The beauty of America has always been to enlarge the sense of tribal affiliation to include larger and larger groups.  If we are all Americans, we all have the opportunity to take part in our community and become part of our culture.  In so far as we can see ourselves as Americans, as all part of the same tribe, then discrimination or victimization is done by individuals to individuals, not by society towards groups.  This idea, as everyone knows, has been under attack for quite some time.  DJ Drummond of Polipundit, in Going Nuclear, has written about the effects of this kind of polarization on our body politic. 

I have been trying to sort out exactly why the Democrats are quite so angry. Well, there is that sad unfortunate demise of their party as a relevant political force, but since so many Democrats are still in denial over that fact, they must be angry about something else. I think, after some thought, I may have an idea.

One of the rare sane Frenchmen in the last century, Claude Levi-Strauss, discussed language as what he called “binary pairs”, where words triggered not only the direct meaning of the word, but also opposition, on the theory that antagonism is a natural characteristic of the human psyche, and reveals itself in communication, down to our choice of words. Thus, any word which shows up often will indicate a deep-seated antipathy.

While this explanation has some merit and certainly goes along with my description of our brain’s and mind’s necessity to make clear distinctions, I think it also does an injustice to the arguments and the dilemmas of the Democratic Party.  In reading many traditionalist, conservative, libertarian and, (to my mind) “old fashioned liberal”) blogs over the last two years, I have the sense that too many fall too comfortably into the Us versus Them dichotomy that we decry in the oppositions’ writings.  While it is sometimes extremely tempting to demonize or belittle what seem like delusional rantings, the enjoyment one may derive form such activity does little to improve the discourse. 

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has posted The 40 Question Reality-Based Community Quiz which is very entertaining and informative, but, while the Quiz is certainly based on some fairly remarkable memes that too many on the left have uncritically accepted, I think the quiz is ultimately a bit unhelpful.  If we keep ourselves unaware of the assumptions that form the underlying basis for people's beliefs, we will never be able to challenge or discuss their "crazy" beliefs.

Please note I am not interested in empathizing with their pain (that is for politicians and Psychobabblers) but in understanding enough about their thinking to be able to engage in constructive discussion and argumentation, and, perhaps more importantly, to recognize the limits of civil and political discourse.

How one gets from recognizing how the mind is organized to understanding how and what to address is a discussion for another day.

PRB MD

January 17, 2005

Slow Posting:

It has been a busy week with too much work, long articles by Victor Davis Hanson on A Postmodern War, and Norman Podhoretz, The War Against World War IV, and snaring the Wife, Daughter and Daughter's BF into the clutches of a Firefly addiction. 

All in all, not much time for blogging, however I do plan on continuing to explore the underlying, primarily unconscious, determinants of our world view and how it impacts the way we understand the War on Terror.

Magic and Rationality

"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke didn't go far enough! 

We live in a  world surrounded by magic.  Our minds evolved in a world of magic.  It is no wonder that it is such an ongoing struggle to think about the world in a rational way.  No one would question that our ancient ancestors, the prototypical hunter-gatherers on the savanna, were embedded in a world where magic was an everyday phenomenon. Their lives were dependent on the sun rising in the morning (where did it go at night anyway, and how did anyone know it would come back the next day all the way over there!), on the vagaries of the weather; they grew ill and died from unseen, invisible enemies.  They attempted to make sense of the world by developing myths and deities.  They would have no trouble with some of the explanations being bruited about concerning the provenance of the recent tsunami: the Gods must have become angry with us.  The idea that sophisticated 21st century, technologically adept people could be equally seen as surrounded by magic would, to many, be a non-starter.  However, I believe it is the necessary starting point in trying to make sense of the world. 

When we say something is magic, it can have various meanings.  It could mean that the event in question is impossible in our experience (a sophisticated and more nuanced comment would be that it violates the laws of physics); an alternative meaning is that we do not understand what is causing the event in question to occur.  For example, how many people do you know who can explain why light appears out of darkness when you flip the switch.  And donbt bother telling me about electrons flowing through wires and heating up when the wire/filament forces them through a narrow space with higher resistance.  In a very fundamental way, this is not a meaningful explanation.  All of our science and technology have simply removed the locus of the magical activity.  To our aforementioned cave ancestor, a flashlight is a magical instrument of the gods.  We, of course, take lights for granted and yet, I would suggest that for all intents and purposes, most of what surrounds us is the equivalent of magic.  If we can not directly experience an action's cause and effect, we can ultimately only hope to infer its source.  No one has ever seen, or will ever see, an electron.  We can build complex machines and apparatuses which allow us to connect a long chain of experimental observations to deduce the existence of electrons.  We then hold forth that their existence has been conclusively proved and no longer is in question.  There is no doubt that this works for us (the computer I am typing this on is sufficient proof of that) but in reality it is a constructed world view; it has great predictive power and is therefore said to be an accurate representation of reality, but it is fundamentally a construct.  (This is, in part, where the deconstructionists have a point, which they then take to such ridiculous extremes as to render their philosophy meaningless, which I suppose is pretty consistent, when you stop to think about it; but I digress.)   The fact is that the construct can only be a reflection of some deeper level of reality, not the reality itself.  Furthermore, the failures of the construct are pretty obvious, even a little embarrassing: just try to wrap your mind around the concept that an electron is both a particle and a wave (and what is a particle, or a wave, anyway?), and let's not even start with Quantum Mechanics! 

We apprehend the world around us through our senses.  We say that a brick wall is hard and solid because when we punch it, we damage our fist and our brains receive input from our peripheral nervous system that our minds interpret as pain.  Anything out of our immediate experience can only be taken on faith.  As a scientific observer of the human mind, I believe in our consensus reality, our theories of the world, but I do not mistake them for reality and I certainly do not expect them to be immutable. 

At the moment there is an ongoing argument/discussion taking place in the fields of Psychiatry, Psychology, Neurology, Neurophysiology and various related endeavors.  The question is asked whether or not the mind is an emergent epiphenomenon of the brain (think of the mind as the person/homunculus who sits right behind your eyes explaining to you why you just did what you did; but then, where does the YOU come form?  Better yet, don't think of it; it gets confusing and causes headaches.)  In any event, we know the mind and brain are pretty important and intimately related to each other.  It would surprise no one to recognize that changes in the brain can change the structure of the mind (think of frontal lobotomies) but you might be surprised to know there is considerable evidence that changing the mind (as in psychotherapy) can change the structure of the brain.  At the same time, humans (and animals) can do quite well without much of a mind (I love my Golden Retriever, but he is not much of a deep thinker) so why do we have or need a mind anyway?

As you can see, we can not even agree on a theory of the mind (is it unitary or compartmentalized?) and where it comes from so trying to find a consensus reality is a daunting task.  (As an aside, I do not disparage or question those who believe it is a gift from the Deity; I would love that to be true.  Unfortunately, that idea is not testable, even using the rather inadequate tools of the scientific method, and since the only weapon we have against magic is the scientific method, I am going to confine myself to theories that can pass itbs test.  If, one day, we can use our scientific method to prove the existence of God, I will rejoice; until then, we are talking about faith, not knowledge.)

To summarize where we have come so far:  we are forced to use instruments we poorly understand (our senses) to interpret data from the environment that is even more poorly understood (photons, etc) that can then be translated, ie given meaning, by an object we have even less knowledge of (our minds).  Our rationality is the thinnest of veneers covering a shaky edifice sitting on a shelf of thin ice which is constantly melting away beneath us; the merest touch looses the Monsters from the Id.

More to follow.

Jan. 3, 2005: First approximation

Only the most foolishly optimistic of organisms would have the temerity to attempt to understand their own inner workings. The Scientific Method has enabled us to understand our world in a depth and detail that is mind boggling, while our own boggled minds defy interpretation. We have few tools with which to explore the human mind and little opportunity to control and alter variables, the single best way we have discovered to arrive at *reality*.
Psychoanalysts study the mind and psychoanalytic theory remains the best descriptive construct we have for organizing and understanding the workings of our own mind. Until we can more fully understand our own minds, and the manners in which our minds distort our experiences of reality, we will have a difficult time agreeing on whatever it is we are looking at.
I would like to use this blog to look at the world, from my small corner, magnified by the internet, and through the peculiar prism of my conscious mind, with the goal of perhaps gaining a small modicum of illumination.
I will explore the myriad ways in which we attempt to fool ourselves into imagining we are rational and that we understand our environs.
This is, of necessity, an experiment. If I find it interesting to write and can occasionally learn something from putting this blog together, it will be successful.
The impetus for this blog emerges from a conundrum. The rational person would naively expect that for most questions of daily life, ranging from such important issues as today's menu and attire, to politics and international affairs, once all the relevant data is available, the answers should be obvious. Furthermore, and despite the overuse and overinterpretations of both Quantum mechanics and deconstructionism, there is an expectation that "consensus reality" exists...which brings us to the conundrum: How are we to ever come to agreements on important issues of the day, when we don't even agree on what is real. An example is in order:
As has been documented in many places, the UN has felt it necessary to disparage the United Sates for our supposedly inadequate (initial) response too last week's Tsunami. Both Wretchard, (most recently here),  at the Belmont club and the Diplomads have written extensively about the UN's attempts to assert their authority over the relief efforts even as they have little ability to accomplish anything that might help the people in the afflicted areas. Even without reading their comments it should be pretty obvious that the only way any relief supplies can get to most of the victims of the Tsunami is through the military. It should also be pretty obvious the military with, by far, the greatest ability to handle these types of logistical problems, is the United States military. How is one to make sense of this seeming politicization of what should be a purely humanitarian effort? The easiest answer is that someone is lying and/or evil, using tragedy for their own nefarious purposes. But lets posit, for purposes of this discussion, that everyone involved, consciously, wants what is best for the victims and does not see themselves as having any ulterior motives. How can we reconcile two fundamentally opposed positions: Either the UN is best at providing relief and should run the operation or the US, along with the other three nations in the coordination group should, of necessity, take the lead. I might suggest that this question is not an opinion. All data suggests that the drug store that delivers medicine by car will get the needed drugs to the patient much more quickly than the one which has a delivery boy on foot. The fact that grown and seemingly intelligent people are having front page discussions about this reveals more is at work than the conscious desire to help.
For the Psychoanalyst, this is where things really become interesting. We are left searching for the unconscious determinants of the protagonist's behavior. Only a very smart and intellectually gifted individual (sarcasm, please) can convince themselves the UN, which essentially has no armed forces, can get relief supplies, donated by sovereign countries (mostly the US) to an area of destruction better than can the US, Australian, Indian, and Japanese military. The UN has always been presented to us as more ethical than mere nation states; they represent all mankind and are above petty politics. In their own need to maintain this self image, they have been ably abetted by our chief image makers in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. It takes a dull child in The Emperor's New Clothes to see through the pretensions of the mighty and such is the case here, when it is conservatives and republicans, aka "stupid red-staters", who have pointed out that the UN's accomplishments have never approached their rhetoric.

The kinds of maneuvers we are looking at here, intellectualization and rationalization primarily, are defense mechanisms, and as with all defense mechanisms, they are designed to defend against a perceived danger to the person involved who is invoking them; more on this for another day.