ShrinkWrapped

Of Boys and Men

Every culture has its own unique Rites of Passage.  These Rites demarcate childhood from adulthood, separating boys from men and girls from women.  As with most sexually differentiated behavior, male Rites of Passage tend to be more dramatic and well defined than the Rites of Passage for girls.  Typically, the demarcation of boys and men invovles the full expression of male aggressivity, channeled into socially acceptable and necessary channels.  Most male Rites of Passage invovle fighting enemies or a derivative.  As we have managed our way to become more civilized, the murderous nature of male Rites has been tempered, so that often such Rites are only distant derivatives of such primitive aggression.  Rites of Passgae also become the basis for the culture's evocation of heroism.  For example, a society that honors the warrior as the greatest ideal to which a boy can aspire can be sure to contain Rites of Passage that glorify aggression.

This creates a problem for pacifist societies.  Since the role of the Rite is to enable the boy to channel his aggression in socially acceptable ways, societies that eschew aggression in all spheres will often find themselves celebrating feminized men who lack the abiltity to express what in more simple times have been known as masculine traits. 

Over the weekend, two experiences brought these thoughts into focus.  On Saturday night I saw 3:10 to Yuma.   This is a wonderful movie on many different levels.  The acting is superb and superbly nuanced.  Russell Crowe exceeds superlatives for his acting, inhabiting a man who is as appealing as he is contemptible.  Yet Christian Bale's even more subtle acting is a revelation.  This movie works on so many different levels that the violence, and there is a lot of violence, though often seeming casual, brutal, and gratuitous, is actually essential to the movie and as informative as it is necessary.

The American western is the genre that captures the quintessence of what it means to be an American.  The American cowboy at his best has always represented an updated version of Medieval chivalry.  The lone Knight/cowboy dispenses rough but fair justice, protecting the weak and defenseless, especially the women and children who otherwise would be left to the mercy of the bad guys.  This is an archetypal story and 3:10 to Yuma does a brilliant job, evoking nothing less than High Noon, perhaps the most compelling and emblematic of the kind.  Yet the differences between the two movies could not be more telling.

[Minimal spoilers follow.]

The Democrats Elect to "Stay the Course"

The Democrats are in a bind.  They have ridden the polls to leads in various arenas, generic Democrat versus generic Republican for Congress, close races among the Democratic contenders versus Republican contenders, but their approach has always been fraught with danger.  The Democratic chance to sweep to victory in the 2008 elections have always depended on the continued ineptitude and corruption of the Republicans (many of whom have done their best to help out) and more importantly, continued problems in Iraq.  If Iraq can be reasonably depicted as a disaster in October of 2008, Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be our next President.  However, she is not stupid and also recognizes that once in office, any subsequent developments in Iraq would be her responsibility.  Thus, the next election crucially depends on the balance between the reality on the ground and the reality as determined by the MSM and the zeitgeist.  What are the options in Iraq?

1) The ideal situation for the Democrats politically would be a failed surge, mild to moderate chaos in Iraq and American foreign policy in the Middle East in disarray.  In such a case the Democrats will almost certainly win the House, Senate, and Presidency, and the next administration will have a number of palatable options for ending the war while blaming the Bush administration for the mess they inherit.  The consequences of pulling our forces out in defeat will be problematic but all politicians are well versed in playing "kick the can"; we will deal with the consequences if and when we have to, to the detriment of our former allies in Iraq and any friends we might still have in the region.

2) A still positive scenario for the Democrats politically, but with an unacceptable level of uncertainty, would be the worst case scenario in Iraq, ie, a failed surge with severe chaos.  While the Democrats would probably still sweep to victory, even as the Republicans accuse them of abandoning our allies and accepting defeat, the next administration would come into office with a major crisis on their hands and few decent options for defusing what would likely develop into a regional conflagration.  No Democratic President, even those who desire most fervently to abandon the mission, could welcome such an outcome (though Dennis Kucinich just might be blind enough to support the idea.)  Furthermore, as Hillary Clinton suggested, in a race in which the Republican nominee will not be directly tied to the Bush White House, the voter response to increased violence and possibly increased terrorism, would be at best unpredictable.

3) The worst case scenario for the Democrats corresponds to the best case scenario for Iraq.  This is not news but is worth repeating.

L’shanah tovah!

Bookworm was so eloquent this year that I borrowed her sentiments:

Did you know that Rosh Hashanah, along with Yom Kippur, of course, is one of the oldest continuously celebrated holidays in the world? It got its start in Leviticus:

23:23 And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
23:24 Speak to the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first [day] of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.
23:25 Ye shall do no servile work [in it]; but ye shall offer an offering made by fire to the LORD.

Leviticus itself dates back about 3,500 years ago. On the Jewish calendar, which is a lunar, not a solar calendar, it has an even longer time line, since we inaugurate this night Jewish Year 5768.

To all my friends, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, L’shanah tovah. May this be a happy year, one of hope, renewal, safety, and good things for those people, places, and ideas we value.

All I can add is this wish for all my loved ones, friends, and extended friends:

May the New Year bring Health, Happiness, and most importantly, Peace.

On Reassurance

One of the most popular misconceptions about psychotherapy is the near ubiquitous belief among those who are naive to psychotherapy that the primary purpose of therapy is to reassure and thereby lessen anxiety.  This belief is perpetuated almost daily on the various talk shows that dependably confirm the victimhood of the publicity hungry sufferers who populate their stage and reassure them of their inherent goodness and right to whatever particular emotional state they currently inhabit.  While there is a place for reassurance in Medicine and in Psychotherapy, its wanton overuse is both reflective and reinforcing of a problem.

When a new patient arrives in my office and I begin an assessment, part of what I am interested in is the level of maturity of the person and their ability to tolerate discomfort.  For that very small fraction who are unable to tolerate anxiety, sadness, anger without experiencing disorganizing levels of distress, my approach is to first help them establish a more sound platform upon which to support their basic character structure and then proceed to help them find ways to address the weaknesses within them that have created the conditions that led them to my office.  Sometimes this includes medications to minimize the danger posed by the tendency to disorganization produced by inherent mental instability (psychosis) or affective instability (serious mood disorders, sever character pathology, neurophysiological vulnerabilities, etc.)  Often, I consciously enable the use by the patient of my self as a transference object in order to give the a stable person upon whom to rely when their own abilities to ope are overtaxed.  It is rare that I see someone who needs to exclusively rely on such techniques.  Most people once introduced to the idea of unconscious ideas and their influence, are able to gain from the active exploration of their own minds, always being aware that if they begin to experience disorganizing or disorienting levels of discomfort, there are ways for us to manage together to deal with the uncomfortable states.

I almost never reassure a patient (and am routinely lambasted for my "cruel withholding" by patients who are sufficiently secure in their therapy, and not yet convinced of its futility, to do so) yet reassurance is one place where our (pseudo)therapeutic culture and our politics intersect, to the detriment of our political discourse and our body politic.

There are several reasons I so rarely reassure, starting with what should be an obvious one:  Reassurance never works.

Hovering in the Background: Part II

I am an amateur when it comes to thinking strategically.  I may read a great deal and attempt to think about the world in a strategic manner but I recognize that I have significant limitations in my ability to grasp all of the currents at work at any one time and even more significant limitations in my ability to predict the outcome of specific actions by important players.  In human affairs, the rule of unintended consequences in conjunction with Murphy's Law has primacy.  A corollary is that we can never know enough about a person or persons to accurately predict behavior despite the fact that in certain circumstances statistical portraits of people and populations can be limned.

Where I do have professional expertise is in understanding the power of the unconscious and the strength and ability of emotion to control manifest behavior.  This extends to an awareness of how readily people can convince themselves, using rationality and logic, that they are behaving rationally when in fact they are expressing the deepest of unconscious passions.  Thus, when I discuss Iran I have some concerns on a strategic basis but would be more than willing to defer to those who have spent much more time and effort thinking about such issues.  I would however include one caveat:  I would want to know that the strategists have an awareness of the psychological issues at play and have factored such issues into their strategizing.  My sources within the Intel community have told me that Psychological profiling and interpretation is considered of minor concern and when done is done poorly; this raises serious concerns that we may be making the classical narcissistic error in regards to Iran, that is, assuming their desires and motivations are similar to ours.  It may well be true that many, perhaps most, of the Iranian Mullahs use their religious beliefs cynically to hold and maintain power and when push comes to shove will behave in ways designed to rationally assure their survival, but there are reasons for concern.

Last weekend, Tom Barnett, one of our smartest strategists, made the point that Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon should not be cause for alarm.  Nuclear weapons lead to moderation and two enemies with nuclear weapons tend to find ways to ensure they are never used.  This worked during the Cold War (after the initial demonstrations of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended WWII) and is likely to eventually moderate the passions at play in the Middle East:

Hovering in the Background

Today, General Petraeus is scheduled to present his report on the current state of affairs in Iraq subsequent to the beginning of the surge and his prescription for the future of the American military involvement in Iraq.  There has already been a great deal of commentary in preparation for his report, much of it confirming the view that mere facts have very little sway on emotionally held opinions.  I do not plan on adding to the commentary here but wold like to address the "elephant in the room", Iran.

There has been a fair amount of tumult in the Blogosphere over Iran recently, with a number of journalists and bloggers claiming that the Bush administration is preparing the ground for an attack on Iran.  Daniel Drezner has a summary, with links, on the tough test of Iran. 

Richard Fernandez has been discussing with Michael Ledeen the desirability of seeking regime change in Iran at this time.  They differ on how ready Iran is for such a revolution but both agree with the basic premise that Iran has been and continues to be at war with us and remains the font of much of the turmoil in Iraq as well as in the greater Middle East.  Ledeen who explicitly does not seek a military attack on Iran concludes:

One thing is as certain as anything can be in a world inhabited by human beings: if we do not attempt to bring them down from within, the mullahs will one day soon demonstrate they have nukes. And on that day we will be faced with two terrible choices: either accept that fact, with all its frightening geopolitical consequences, or bomb them. Sarkozy recently put it in those words, in fact. In my opinion, that would constitute a massive policy failure, and I am trying hard to convince people that there is a better way.

Richard Fernandez addresses those (including Daniel Drezner) who would suggest benign neglect as a policy toward Iran:

It may actually be useful to let Iran know that one major American political party is thinking about responding forcefully to the Ayatollah's challenges. That may have a deterrent effect and actually make war less likely. Attacking Iran may be the wrong response. But clearly it is a legitimate subject for public policy debate, one that should presumably give its opponents an opportunity to put forward their own alternative policy.

Any debate or discussion about Iran must recognize the complexity of the situation and the lack of any good solutions.  The discussion in the comments section, as always is enlightening and includes a succinct summary of the base positions in contention by TigerHawk:

The Future of the Long War: Winning by Losing and Winning by Winning

As Washington awaits General Petraeus's report on 9/11, and the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden promises a new video as part of al Qaeda's psychological war against the West, several lessons are becoming clear about the Long War.  Most importantly, lessons from Iraq and the Palestinian Territories (especially Gazastan), reveal the intimate relationship between the Islamists and the West that can either marginalize or nurture them.  In every front in this war, Jihad exhibits a profound and dynamic dependency on the Western world that is determinative.

The lesson may be clearest in Iraq, specifically in Anbar province.  By losing Anbar we set the stage for our current success, which would never have been possible, no matter how many troops we had in Iraq, if we had not first lost the battle for Anbar.  No proud people will long tolerate an occupation if they have the means to resist.  The Sunnis quite understandably experienced the American troops as occupiers.  They had no real experience of America and the American military beyond their own propaganda (importantly accentuated by the propaganda efforts of the anti-war MSM, efforts that were voraciously ingested and amplified by the anti-American Arab media) and not unexpectedly, their violent resistance led to the effective surrender of Anbar province to the Jihadis.  Once entrenched in power, the Islamists did what every fanatical group has done throughout history: They used terror to maintain their rule.  They instituted their cramped, vicious version of Sharia and terrorized, terrified, and alienated the very population whose forbearance they required in order to thrive.  Once the subject population recognized that they had escaped the frying pan only to land in the fire (sometimes quite literally), the stage was set for the American troops to be warily welcomed as the lesser of two evils; only after the true evil of al Qaeda was evidenced could the Sunnis offer the time and space for the American military to show they could be "no truer friend."  Our success in Anbar, and now in Diyala, absolutely depended on our first losing.  An argument can also be made that a similar trajectory in Afghanistan was a pre-requisite for the relative ease with which our military overthrew the Taliban.  (And, despite almost daily news stories touting the resurgence of the Taliban, the fact is that they have been thoroughly marginalized and their only successes are the murder of innocents, further alienating the population who comprise the sea they must swim within.)

The one area where losing has not been a prerequisite for winning remains Palestine.  This is a peculiarity of the Palestinian culture and the Israeli diffidence, and relates to a second way in which the war can be won or lost.

Ending Aging

Over the last few weeks I have been engrossed in a book by John Gribben called The Scientists.  The book is, as described,  "a history of Science told through the lives of its greatest inventors."  The book offers brief biographies of many scientists that are very well known, like Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, as well as more obscure inventors and researchers like Thomas Digges (the first to suggest that the universe is infinite), Pierre Gassendi (who reinvigorated the idea of matter being composed of "atoms" which existed in a void), and Marcello Malpighi (who discovered capillaries and completed William Harvey's description of the circulation of blood.)  And that is only in the first quarter of the book.

For anyone interested in understanding how we have come to stand at the peak of an edifice based on the painstakingly accumulated knowledge that forms the basis of the life we lead, this book is invaluable, not to mention easily digested.   

Beyond the readability and the awe with which you read of how mere men and women have lifted us by our book straps, two things struck me about these exceptional men (and a few women of science) to whom we owe so much.  One was their  passionate dedication to understanding the world around them.  From myth and mystery, magic and irrationality, they struggled to find ways to understand what they were experiencing.  When you understand how difficult that task remains for the sophisticated denizens of 21st century civilization, their feat takes on even greater meaning.

The second thing that struck me and stayed with me was how fleeting their time was.  Nicolaus Copernicus, who removed the Earth from the center of the universe and intuited its revolution around the sun (the first crucial step in understanding the universe) died at 70, an old man.  Andreas Vesalius, the first enlightenment man to begin the systematic study of anatomy, died of an unknown illness at 50.  William Gilbert, who performed the first scientific study of magnetism and was named "the first scientist" by Gribben, died at 59.  Rene Descartes, a giant of science and philosophy, who insisted that the world could be understood by reason and the scientific method, died just short of his 54th birthday.

I could go on, but the salient point is that all these men, even Galileo who lived to be78, died at an age that nowadays we would consider far too young.  Building on the structure that these people helped to midwife, we are now approaching a time when aging could well be tamed, if not completely conquered, and that is the subject of Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey's book on "the rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime."   

The Mental Health Industry's Dirty Little Secret

When Sigmund Freud discovered a way to explore the dynamic unconscious and, when luck and effort came into concordance, help patients resolve serious mental disorders, a new field of endeavor was born.  Psychoanalysis was the first "talking cure" that could actually help people.  Since that time, a multitude of factors have led to an exponential increase in the number and types of Psychotherapy.  As well, there has been an exponential increase in the types of mental disorders treated.  Much of this has been extremely useful to those who once would have had to suffer without hope, yet especially in the last 15 years, it has been hard to avoid the sense that the Mental Health Industry has gone seriously awry.

Recently evidence that Therapism has gone beyond reasonable limits has come from a number of sources.  Glenn Reynolds described a frightening situation in England, home of the National Health Service:

SHADES OF MINORITY REPORT: "A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of "emotional abuse", even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way. Social services' recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met. Hexham children's services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself."

There is a certain inevitability to such stories.  After all, once the government decides what is best for its subjects, all in the name of benevolence and caring, it follows rather predictably that they will begin to intervene in order to ensure the outcomes of which they approve.  Further, when the government pays for health care, they will naturally want to enforce adherence to those behaviors they imagine will minimize their financial exposure. 

All of this emerges from the Mental Health Morass that has developed since Freud's initial principles have been misunderstood and misapplied in the name of Mental Health.

The Suicide of Reason

The subtitle of Lee Harris's The Suicide of Reason is "Radical Islam's Threat to the West".  Harris proceeds to make the argument that the outcome of the Long War will be determined not by military and economic power, but by the ability of the combatants to pursue their ideological goals unimpeded by doubt and unhindered by the inhibitory power of Reason. 

His thesis is probably familiar to many readers in the Blogopshere.  The West has been so successful that they now fail to realize how fragile civilization is and how easily frightened or angry people can revert to the primitive.  Harris contrasts our response to 9/11 with past responses to attacks on Western homelands:

In a world governed by the law of the jungle, America would have responded to this attack with blind and immediate retaliation:  They had killed thousands of our people, now we will kill hundreds of thousands of theirs--and it matters not at all which ones we kill, nor whether they were in any way responsible for the attack.  This, after all, was how even the civilized English had responded to the German attacks on London--they fire-bombed Hamburg, killing sixty thousand men, women, and children over a few days, and later, and even more pointlessly, they would fire-bomb the city of Dresden, incinerating so vast a number of innocent civilians that no one even today is quite certain whether the number killed is closer to sixty thousand or a hundred and forty thousand.

This was not how the United States chose to respond to the major attacks of 9/11.  No responsible leaders cried out for revenge attacks on the Muslim world.  None evoked the remorseless Us versus Them logic of the tribal vendetta. (p. 40)

The West has achieved incredible power and success by virtue of the long, slow, and difficult climb toward Reason as an organizing principle of society.  In fact, we have been so successful that most people literally have no clue how arduous a process it has been and how much of an anomaly a society based on the rule of Reason actually is.