ShrinkWrapped

The Confusion of the "Liberal by Temperament"

There is a small, hard core committed cohort on the Left who firmly believe in using the power of the state to control how people live their lives.  Those who are admittedly socialist or communist are a very small number, however a much larger number believe in using the power of the state to control people out of "liberal" sentiments; I call these people "Liberals by temperament".  Somehow, over the last 30-40 years Liberal has gone from meaning something akin to quasi-Libertarian to overtly Statist in its orientation.  Perhaps the disappointment of failing to see their deepest desires, of equality of outcomes across social groups, come to fruition has led many to adopt a mood akin to revolutionary-lite.  While the neo-Statists would not support sending counter-revolutionaries to the Gulag, they often rationalize an interest in taking from the well to do and giving to the needy regardless of quaint notions of property rights and freedom.  Their confusion comes from the contradictions inherent in the political philosophy now holding sway on the Left-Liberal side of the political divide.

In general the Left believes in using government power to control people's economic behavior while the Right has traditionally believed in using government power to control people's personal behavior.  The maxim has been that the Left wants government out of our bedrooms while the Right wants government out of our boardrooms.  What we have been learning in the last decade or so is that there is a commonality of purpose to Statists on both the Left and the Right.  In either case, government power and control ratchets up and never ratchets back down.

The Liberal by temperament is a person who is a liberal for all sorts of non-ideological reasons.  They desire nothing more than that the unfortunates of the world have the same material success that they are heir to; they fervently wish for equality for all, without recognizing that their privilege comes only in part from their privileged background but even more so from their current behavior.  Further, they denigrate those who are unsophisticated, dumb, and trashy, often without appreciating that some of those they so denigrate are smart enough not to desire to conform to the latest media mediated intellectual and social classism.

Many Conservatives have discovered that when the government is invited into our bedrooms to regulate our behavior, there is a terrible price to pay in the diminution of all our freedoms.  Once the principle is established that government can control behavior "for our own good", when Social Conservatives fall out of power, the "do goodism" does not stop.  Liberals do not yet appreciate that when government  controls business, "for the good of all", our freedoms (and our pocketbooks) are at risk.  Consider Glenn Reynold's rumination on Kelo:

Columbia U. vs. the little guy

We often hear politicians and pundits denounce property rights. Property rights, we're told, protect the fat cats against the needs of the public. They're a tool for keeping the little guy down.

Like a lot of what we hear from politicians and pundits, this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The fat cats don't need the protection of property rights, because they already control the political system. It's the little guy (or gal), the one without political juice, who needs strong property rights for protection from the fat cats and the politicians they control.

This was demonstrated again this week, as the last legal barrier (a possible US Supreme Court review) to Columbia University's efforts to condemn and seize two businesses -- Tuck-it-Away Self-Storage and a gas station owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur in West Harlem -- vanished.

Read the whole thing and keep in mind that people like Singh and Kaur are the newly considered "wealthy", ie they are small businessmen making a living and hiring people to work for them.  The truly wealthy and powerful see them as inconveniences or prey.

But wait, aren't the democrats the party of the working man?  Don't they protect the little guy?  Take a look at Coyote's post:

Obama Meets With James Taggert and Oren Boyle

Amanda Carey via the Daily Caller:

On Wednesday, President Obama met with a group of about 20 CEOs in a five-hour long summit, reportedly in an attempt to soothe the souring relationship between big business and big government. From almost all accounts, the “charm offensive” was successful.

By the end, Boeing CEO John McNerney is reported to have said, “We all wanted to move beyond the talk that made this confrontational environment. We made our apologies.” Honeywell International CEO David Cote said after the meeting, “Government is the enabler of business…Government and business need to work together.”

What Cote did not mention is that his company has already been working closely with the Obama Administration, and was a major beneficiary of the Recovery Act — as were many of the other companies represented. According to Recovery.gov, Honeywell received over $44 million in grants from the Department of Energy (DOE) for renewable energy initiatives. Honeywell also raked in more than $24 million in a variety of different government contracts from agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense.

Can the Aviation Equalization of Opportunity Act be far behind?  The meeting of 19 CEO’s and a leading VC (who feeds noisily at the green energy trough) sounds like the corporate state round-table.

The idea that the Democrats are not in bed with Big Bushiness is a fiction that Liberals by temperament tell themselves to avoid understanding how power and reality operate.  The renewable energy scheme leveraging "Global Warming" is one of the great scams of the 21st century.  It allows such charlatans as Al Gore and companies like GE to extract money from the rubes (that is us, the taxpayers) while wearing the mantel of saviors of the planet.  Elmer Gantry had nothing on these folks.

But wait, isn't business full of corrupt people just ripping people off?

Pittsburgh's Tunnel of LOV

Before Pittsburgh’s light-rail “Tunnel to Nowhere” under the Allegheny River came along, my favorite Port Authority boondoggle was the Wabash Tunnel under Mt. Washington.

Most Pittsburghers know all they need to know about the notorious "Tunnel to Nowhere."

Still under construction and still disrupting downtown Pittsburgh after three years, it's the 1.2-mile, $528 million extension of "The T" (Pittsburgh's light-rail line to the South Hills suburbs) from Gateway Center under the Allegheny River to the North Shore (where the Steelers' and Pirates' subsidized playpens are).

The "Tunnel to Nowhere's" humorless fathers and mothers at the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the local Big Transit franchise, prefer to call it "The North Shore Connector."

But whatever they call it, their baby is still probably going to cost upwards of $.7 billion by the time it's done in 2012. That's when it will begin providing desperately needed cheap public transportation to its key customer base -- Steeler and Pirates fans too lazy to walk across one of four bridges that already connect downtown and the ballparks.

I don't want to spoil the fun; go read the whole thing and you will learn how many cars actually use this tunnel everyday.  It is mind-boggling. 

Finally, there is health care.  As I have pointed out health care is an extremely inexact science and we often do not know the efficacy and utility of a treatment until after it has been used by millions of people for long periods of time.  Many treatments only help a fraction of the target population and differentiating the population who may benefit from those who may suffer serious side effects from those who will gain no benefit or injury can only be determined by trial and error.  Someday this will change but we are still far from the necessary understanding of the human proteome in all its interactions and complexity to be able to shed much light on the issues involved at this time.  That being said, the Liberal by temperament is always certain that government is more compassionate than the evil insurance companies who apparently live and thrive by denying care to people; not so fast:

F.D.A. Rejects Use of Drug in Cases of Breast Cancer

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday moved to revoke the approval of the widely used drug Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer, saying that new studies did not confirm that the medicine was helping patients.

The decision is causing anguish for some women who worry they may no longer have access to a drug they believe is helping to keep them alive. But some patient advocacy groups welcomed the decision, saying Avastin had never been shown to prolong lives and that women with breast cancer need more than false hope.

“I understand that today’s recommendation from the F.D.A. is disappointing for patients with breast cancer,” Dr. Richard Pazdur, head of the agency’s cancer drug division, told reporters in a conference call. “Please note that these findings are also disappointing for the F.D.A. as well.”

The F.D.A. decision was issued on the same day that the European Medicines Agency, operating under different rules but with the same data, left Avastin available to breast cancer patients, but in a narrower way than it had before.

Avastin almost certainly is helping some women and harming some others.  The results for many do not justify the expense.  But how do we find that sub-set who may find a remarkable benefit from Avastin?  Once identified, what would these women and their cancers tell us about the workings of the drug and its target?  With the help of the FDA we may never find out and some women will die who do not have to.  As you know, as far as I am concerned, the FDA is the original "death panel" (and no, that is not an exaggeration; many people die unnecessarily because of FDA delays and inactivity.)

These are just a few of the dots Liberals by temperament need to connect before appreciating that when government can control Wall Street traders (who are smart enough to figure out ways around such control anyway, even when they don't actually write the rules themselves; ever wonder why Goldman-Sachs didn't oppose the Financial Reform Bill?) they can control what you eat, where you can work, and how you will live or die.  That is why the Tea Party movement, even if led by "white trash", like Sarah Palin, is here to stay.

The Morality of the Übermensch: The Will to Power

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper

I have no interest in repeating any of the discussion from The Morality of the Übermensch except to note that it is obvious that you do not need to believe in G-d in order to be a moral person.  I stand by my contention that without a connection to our current conception of G-d or to the Judeo-Christian tradition and morality that our culture rests upon, you risk the grave danger of relying on amorality disguised as morality.  After all, if the essence of our morality is Just do it or If it feels good, do it, which seems to be the lowest common denominator of morality, you are not describing morals but the absence of morals.

The idea that morality is based on inherent characteristics of our brains is also problematic.  The youngest parts of our brain are those parts that determine our character, our conscious minds.  Our conscious mind is a fragile structure that sits atop a seething cauldron of unconscious, more primal, desires which must be inhibited for civilization to arise from the interplay of many millions of barely rational beings.  As I have noted many times, our rationality is a thin layer resting atop the irrational.  The input from the higher levels of the nervous system to the lower is primarily inhibitory; we must inhibit our desires and impulses if we are to be conscious, moral creatures. 

One of the most problematic of our desires, typically buried under a mountain of rationalization, is the wish to control other people and have power over them.  Nietzsche described the Will to Power as one of the animating principles of homo sapiens and a number of Psychoanalysts and Psychologists have used variations on the idea as part of their explanation of the structure and workings of the human mind.

I do not have time for a longer post today but would like to leave you with a brief comment which encapsulates how the desire to control others can be easily rationalized as being an altruistic, noble desire:

Statism in a nutshell

I found revealing a statement Michelle Obama made after her husband signed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, a law that buffs up school lunch programs at the expense of food stamps (emphasis mine):

[W]hen our kids spend so much of their time each day in school, and when many children get up to half their daily calories from school meals, it’s clear that we as a nation have a responsibility to meet as well,” Mrs. Obama said. “We can’t just leave it up to the parents. I think that parents have a right to expect that their efforts at home won’t be undone each day in the school cafeteria or in the vending machine in the hallway. I think that our parents have a right to expect that their kids will be served fresh, healthy food that meets high nutritional standards.”

That’s statism in a nutshell, isn’t it?  “We can’t just leave it up to the parents.”  This absolves the state of any responsibility for protecting children whose parents no longer care for the children.  It’s so much easier, instead, just to push all parents aside.  This global approach has the purity of Occam’s Razor.  There are no unnecessary details.  Instead, there’s just a fundamental power grab.

Those among the Übermenschen who desire only to protect us from ourselves are among the noblest of all.  We should be happy to pay obeisance to them.  After all, once their charges  have been abandoned by G-D (or, more accurately, abandoned Him), they are merely little lambs in need of protection from themselves by those who aspire to replace Him. 

For the record, I remain an agnostic and if He does exist, expect to spend a fair amount of time in purgatory for my sins.  On the other hand, I try to live my life as if He does exist because it seems wise in the long run.  Those atheists and Buddhists who live under a morality indistinguishable from (or compatible with) the current iteration of Judeo-Christian morality, should have the humility to recognize that they are following a religiously derived morality and that the alternative moralities are much more problematic than the morality that has evolved through the thinking of a great many very wise men and women over the last few thousand years. 

Without G-d we will find something (Gaea?) to replace Him and risk repeating all of the horrors and atrocities that accompanied the long journey to our current semi-enlightened state.  There is little difference in the (a)morality that facilitates the death of millions of Jews, or counter-revolutionaries, in the name of the Volk or the people,  from the amorality of some in the radical Environmental movement who would facilitate the murder of millions in the name of saving the planet.  Ultimate goals end up rationalizing ultimate means when there are no constraints.

Neuro Nonsense

I enjoyed this article, a book review by Ben A. Barres of  Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference, so much that I decided to use the writer's post title for my own:

Neuro Nonsense

No one disputes that male and female brains are different or that males and females differ in their accomplishments. But are these two facts related? A few years ago Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that the answer is yes. He proposed that innate brain differences help to account for the dearth of successful women in science, provoking much heated debate. Reporters called it the story that would not die. Unlike most news stories that exhaust themselves after a few days, this story stayed in the news for months, and even years later continues to inspire debate. Apparently many of us think we already know the answer to this question—the subject of Cordelia Fine's highly readable and enjoyable new book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. At least half of us—not just the men—seem to think the answer is yes whereas the other half say not so.

You all know where I stand on this issue. Based on my experiences as a neurobiologist and as a transgendered person, I have previously argued that innate sex differences in the brain are not relevant to real-world accomplishments. [Emphasis mine-SW] Without question, male and female brains have different circuits that help to control their different reproductive behaviors. So it has long seemed an easy step to believe that such anatomic changes also underlie supposed gender differences in cognitive abilities. Rather, in a theme that Fine elegantly expands on, it is the idea itself that women are innately less capable that may be the primary cause of differences in accomplishment. This idea Fine appropriately dubs “neurosexism.” This idea was long ago powerfully encapsulated in the concept of “stereotype threat,” the phenomenon in which members of a sex or race perform substantially worse on a test—and perhaps in real-world environments—when they are led to believe before the test that they are innately less capable.

I don't want to be too snarky, though this review tends to elicit such a response.  David Thompson has addressed the tendency of the transgressive progressive to pathologize what was once quaintly referred to as "normal":

If the prosaic can be made to sound oppressive or inauthentic, it makes those who announce themselves as nonconformist sound much braver and more interesting than they actually are (if only to themselves and those similarly disposed). For instance, the clownish Amanda Marcotte rails against any number of “normativities,” all of which she seeks to pathologise. It isn’t enough that she doesn’t feel an urge to become a parent. She has to claim that those who do wish to become parents don’t know their own minds and are dupes of some hegemonic power. In much the same way, the preference for an intact and functional body is depicted as both a parochial social construct and a moral failing. And likewise, the belief that “binary gender” is not “natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans” is based on an occasional malfunction of the very biological processes that are imagined not to exist.

What I would like to emphasize for Ben A. Barres is that our biases, even when we admit them up front, tend to bias our selection of material and how we interpret the material.   I am fully prepared to accept that most Psychological research and even most neuropsychological research has significant methodological defects.  Further, a number of good arguments can be made that brain structure is quite plastic in response to experience and that people with different brain structures will still have an enormous overlap in their abilities.  Scientists and even more so science reporters tend to oversimplify their results and over-interpret them. 

Perhaps the best example of how one's conscious bias can unconsciously affect one's thinking shows up in Ben A. Barres's concluding paragraph:

Finally, Fine supplies some wonderful pointers to those who write books about gender: Do not suggest that parents or teachers treat boys and girls differently because of differences observed in their brains. Exercise extreme caution when making the perilous leap from brain structure to psychological function. Most importantly, please don't make stuff up! I think that Fine is at her best when she points out that neuroscientists have responsibility for how their findings are interpreted. They—and reviewers and editors—bear a heavier burden of caution because of the social implications of this work. She concludes that neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, and potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes, powerfully reminding us that neuroscience can be dangerous when mishandled. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Apparently, Fine's conclusion is that differences in brain structure are not only not necessarily related to differences in behavior (a defensible position though it has already been eroding in the face of a growing body of neuropsychological research) but that such structural differences have nothing to do with behavioral outcomes.  She then concludes that the actual cause of differences in behavior between men and women has to do with a brand new construct, neurosexism, (discernible perhaps in a penumbra emanating from psychosocial research) that is so subtle that it has been missed by generations of researchers and nonetheless leads people to behave differently! 

If she were to suggest that brain structures and subtle environmental effects, so far unmeasurable, with such effects in need of research might include neurosexism, interact in complex ways, it might be possible for her to design an experiment to test for neurosexism and see if it effects structure and behavior.  To insist that structure is meaningless and only the unmeasurable and so far hidden variable, neurosexism, is dispositive is evidence of rationalization, not rationality. 

[I would add that the consistent differences in the size of the standard deviation on psychological testing between male and female, noted from the earliest days of testing, a point Larry Summers was trying to make, is not addressed in the Barres post.  Perhaps in the book , Fine finds a way to show that such SD differences are proof of subtle neurosexism rather than differences in the robustness of brain structures.]

There is no question that we come into the world with a potential for all sorts of brain structures whose actuality is determined by an interplay between our experience/environment, our genetic loading, and other constitutional factors.  We can all agree that to overweight Nature as the primary explanation is problematic; however, Cornelia Fine, et al make an even greater error by insisting that Nature has nothing to do with differences.  This is merely sophisticated perversion of the data in the service of one's biases.

In Treatment

During its first season on HBO, several of my patients mentioned watching, and enjoying, HBO's In Treatment, a show purporting to be an accurate depiction of the process of therapy and an introduction to the workings of the therapist's mind.  The series started out more promising than I expected.  There seemed to be an honest attempt to show how interpretations were made and how the skilled therapist could use the transference, the relationship between the therapist and the patient, for therapeutic change.  Each night's half hour episode followed the progress of a particular patient through a period of time in their therapy.  I was perfectly willing to accept the sensationalizing of therapy that was certain to occur in any theatrical depiction of therapy; like anything else that gets dramatized by Hollywood, most of the work in therapy takes place in non-dramatic increments which would be hard to watch on TV.  Unfortunately, by the second half of the first season I found myself growing increasingly disenchanted.  The therapist began to have more and more trouble maintaining therapeutic neutrality and the show began to go so far over the top in order to dramatize the sessions that its resemblance to a therapeutic process was increasingly tenuous.  By the end of the first season I had stopped watching and though I did check in on one or two episodes in the second season, my curiosity was slaked and I had accepted that, like everything else Hollywood touches, In Treatment was no longer about its nominal subject but had become an instrument for the creators of the show to illustrate their fantasies about therapy and therapists.

[As an aside, Hollywood does marvelous things in their depictions of Psychiatrists and other therapists.  We range from the rare Saintly creatures like Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, to extremely fallible people with no ability to maintain appropriate therapeutic limits, like Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides, to the wonderfully malefic Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill and the brilliantly over the top pure evil of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. In general, Psychiatrist as malevolent destroyer of innocents tend to out number Psychiatrist as noble Savior of psyches in popular culture.  This says more about Hollywood and unconscious fantasies of Psychoanalysis than it does about the reality of therapy; it also tends to be much more entertaining than most psychotherapy sessions.]

Clare Spark has put her distinctive stamp on In Treatment in HBO’s In Treatment and Boardwalk Empire:

First, In Treatment: the first two seasons were adapted from an Israeli series; the third season, completed last week, was not. In the last episode, Paul Weston, a clinical psychologist, doubts whether or not he should remain in his profession, for he has no objective way to evaluate the accuracy of what his clients are telling him. This is postmodernist uncertainty and existentialist despair, pure and simple. Whereas at least one of his patients in season one (the teen-age gymnast) was pulled back from the brink of suicide through therapy, in season three, Sunil, the Indian father-in-law of the blonde and assertive “Julia,” has tread lightly on the truth in order to get himself deported back to his home country, thus triggering a failure of nerve in Paul. We are left hanging in the season finale, as Paul, rejected as a sexual partner by his latest female therapist, melts into the Brooklyn street, a street inhabited by hoi polloi. Such a dim view of therapy can only bolster the anti-psychiatry movement that does not base its critique on something persuasive, such as the clinical emphasis on the immediate family as opposed to the family as it operates in an abundance of confusing and failed institutions (schools, the justice system, state-imposed bureaucratic rules that strangle production and innovation in general).

Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysts spend a great deal of time and psychic energy trying to understand the difference between reality, psychic reality, and fantasy.  There is tremendous overlap but the effect on one's psyche from real trauma remains much more indelible than the effects of fantasy, though the relationship between the two is complex and they are often inextricably intertwined.  To succumb to "postmodernist uncertainty and existentialist despair" may be trendy but devalues the therapeutic work that therapist-patient combinations can accomplish and, as noted by Clare Spark, tends to empower the larger social structures over the individual.

Her comments about Boardwalk Empire (which I have never seen) are trenchant and worth considering in all of our discussions of how the moral structures that undergird our culture are under attack:

By comparison with agent Van Alden (an old Dutch-American name), Nucky and his chief lieutenant, a returning wounded veteran of the first world war, are model citizens, for they are home-loving and monogamous; the audience will side with these amiable Irishmen against their Italian and Jewish thug enemies. That is how stories work. Even if the protagonists are anti-heroes, their “good” sides and damaging family histories will encourage the audience to identify with them. (Recall the anxiety that many fans experienced at the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos.) The audience will root for them, just as they root for the lawless celebrities and political leaders who are standing up for “law and order” in today’s endlessly cynical political culture of today—a culture that condemns the Puritans as narcissists and killjoys, while elevating the pornography of sex and violence as some kind of artistic breakthrough in mass entertainment.

Those who make their living (a very good living) by supplying entertainment, the visual and aural images which form the basis of our modern mythology, claim that they are only giving their audiences what they want.  It is true that few go broke pandering to the most base impulses of our natures, but a culture that replaces love and respect with the "pornography of sex and violence" is a culture that is voraciously embracing decadence (an admittedly archaic term in a post-modern culture) that, among other things, presages the fall.

The lower socioeconomic classes have been committing cultural suicide for a very long time; now the middle of America is moving down the same path:

The State Of Our Unions: New Study Reports Growing 'Marriage Gap'

Affluent, well-educated Americans are enjoying increasingly stable, strong marriages, even as marital happiness is plummeting and the chances of divorce are rising among middle Americans. These are among the startling findings of "When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America," a new study released by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and New York's Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

This cannot end well.

No amount of Treatment can prevent a culture from committing suicide.

The Morality of the Übermensch

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

A Columbia University Professor has just been brought up on charges of incest with his adult daughter:

Columbia professor is charged with incest, accused of bedding young relative for 3 years

A popular Columbia professor was charged Thursday with incest - accused of a sick sex relationship with a female relative, prosecutors said.

Political science Prof. David Epstein, 46, bedded the young woman over a three-year period ending last year, according to court papers.

The story has become much commented upon in the blogosphere.  That Professor Epstein was an example of liberal nastiness presents the Right Blogosphere with much occasion for schadenfreude; RS McCain has collected a fair number of links and offered his own commentary:

Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest

Let’s begin with a flashback, shall we? In July 2009, when Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, Columbia University professor David Epstein wrote at his Huffington Post blog:

Palin has done what weak, self-centered people do when the going gets tough — they quit and blame someone else.

Got that? Sarah Palin is “weak” and “self-centered.” And, Epstein added, “voters can rest a bit easier with . . . the knowledge that they chose wisely” in voting for Obama-Biden, not McCain-Palin.

Now, let’s flash forward to yesterday’s New York Daily News:

A popular Columbia professor was charged Thursday with incest – accused of a sick sex relationship with a female relative, prosecutors said.
Political science Prof. David Epstein, 46, bedded the young woman over a three-year period ending last year, according to court papers.
He was arraigned before a Manhattan judge on a single felony incest count.
Sources said the victim was over 18 when the relationship began in 2006 and that the two often exchanged twisted text messages.
Epstein faces up to four years behind bars if convicted.

This is the guy who called Sarah Palin “weak” and “self-centered.”

Project much, professor?

Legal bloggers have approached this story from their vantage point.  Ann Althouse asks the legal question: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

A Columbia professor is arrested for incest — but isn't there a constitutional right to incest between consenting adults?

Eugene Volokh asks a series of related questions about the legal treatment of incest.

Glenn Reynolds asks the obvious question in a politically correct environment:

Also, why are they only charging the man in what’s said to have been a consensual relationship between adults? Isn’t that an equal protection violation? Where’s the civil rights community on this?

What the legal bloggers do not talk about is the limitations of the law in dealing with many different issues that are fundamentally moral rather than legal.  The trend for the last 100 years, since the death of G-d was proclaimed, has been to enlarge the writ of the law while shrinking the reach of morality.  The argument is made on a regular basis that there is little need for a Deity to instruct our morality.  (I addressed some thoughts to this in a post last week: To Debate Religion ... or Not.)  The question of incest is a perfect illustration of the limits of legally based morality and the inability to establish any limits when morality is divorced from the religious tradition from which it emerged.

Those who believe we can construct a morality divorced from our Judeo-Christian heritage suggest there is a universal morality that can be established based on what should be relatively self evident principles, most of which are iterations and derivatives of Game Theory.  We are helpful and fair with others because the alternatives lead to poor outcomes for all.  Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, ie I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior.  In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another's god.

Religion is devalued by so many sophisticates because religion, as practiced in the West, served to constrain our behavior.  To be a moral man or woman was to accept limitations on the expression and gratification of our desires.  Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us. 

There is almost no way to construct a rational, legally based morality that forbids incest between adults.  Most of us have a visceral reaction of disgust when we think about incest because the taboos are so deeply ingrained but the incest taboo can not be supported by rational argument alone.  Since the Übermensch is defined by his ability to rise above conventional morality and create his own morality, there are no effective limits to the Übermensch; any purely rational morality designed by humans can be changed on a whim and fully rationalized as a new, emerging morality with minimal effort.  The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.

[For an interesting perspective on how Nietzsche's ideas were corrupted by the Nazis, see Professor Barry Rubin's post on The Strangest Antisemite of Them All: The Bizarre Case of Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche did not mean to rationalize genocide but when G-d is dead all things can be rationalized by Homo rationalis.]

I have not even touched upon the psychology of incest, especially parent-child incest, which includes the refusal to accept limits and denial of differences.  Incest is perverse in psychological terms because it destroys the meaning of words and differentiations.  In parent-child incest the difference between generations is denied and the significance of the primal ties between parent and child are denied.  Grown children remain the child of their parents no matter what their age which means that a chronologically adult child is still psychologically a child of the parent with whom he or she has incest.  Perhaps some do rise above such conventional notions of morality; perhaps we are seeing the advent of the Übermensch, but we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (ie, Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

Curious addendum: As we get smaller and more insignificant in reality, with recent stories suggesting there may be three times as many stars in the universe as we thought and a new story suggesting we may have found evidence for the existence of other Universes, our sense of ourselves, our Hubris, or Narcissism, if you prefer, seems to keep getting grander in inverse proportion to our actual importance.  If we are alone in the Universe, and so far there is no evidence we are not, that means in a Universe devoid of First Principles, we are simply an incredibly lucky accident of no particular import; only if there is (was?) a creator do we have any particular significance beyond ourselves, in the grand scheme of things. 

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers and a thank you to Glenn for the link.

The Enablers: The Men of Words

First, courtesy of Melanie Phillips, a gift from the international elites:

Latest UN shocker: 'It's ok to kill gays'.

Those who persist in the delusion that the Club for the Perpetuation of Tyranny and Terror, aka the United Nations, is the authoritative arbiter of global justice and ‘human rights’ should be asked whether they still think the same thing after reading this:

Last week, the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted on a special resolution addressing extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions. The resolution affirms the duties of member countries to protect the right to life of all people with a special emphasis on a call to investigate killings based on discriminatory grounds. The resolution highlights particular groups historically subject to executions including street children, human rights defenders, members of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority communities, and, for the past 10 years, the resolution has included sexual orientation as a basis on which some are targeted for death.

The tiny West African nation of Benin (on behalf of the UN's African Group) proposed an amendment to strike sexual minorities from the resolution. The amendment was adopted with 79 votes in favor, 70 against, 17 abstentions and 26 absent.

A collection of notorious human rights violators voted for the amendment including Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, North Korea, Iran (didn't Ahmadinejad tell the world there were no gays in Iran?), Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

Next, a digression:

I entered medical school in New York in 1974 and finished my Residency training at Bellevue Hospital 8 years later.  The 1970's through the 1990's were the heyday of liberal policies in New York, a town that has never strayed far from its liberal roots) and on the streets of New York and in the Bellevue Emergency Room and on the Psychiatric wards we saw the fruits of our liberalism on a daily basis.  I would walk from SOHO (downtown) to NYU Medical Center everyday and have to detour around street people in residence on the sidewalk on every block.  Aggressive panhandlers, almost universally looking for money to support their drug and alcohol use, were ubiquitous. 

The Supreme Court had determined that Psychiatric patients could only be held in the least restrictive conditions and that, except in an emergency situation, Patients had the Right to refuse treatment.  Once the lawmakers in Albany, in a marvelous example of the law of unintended consequences, discovered that the court rulings meant that they could save money by closing state hospitals under the rationalization that such hospitals were not "least restrictive"places to store chronically and severely mentally ill people, a large number of people were sent into the community with no ability to function independently and no community based structure capable of caring for them adequately. 

[Of course, no money was ever actually saved since no one could be fired.  The workers were in a powerful Union, 1199 and New York politicians have mutually corrupted themselves and the Union over the years with mutual payoffs; the Community Mental Health Centers never fully materialized because of NIMBY and lack of money for a politically impotent constituency, the mentally ill; and besides, the theoretical savings were all spent on more favored projects anyway.]

The upshot was that thousands of Psychiatric patients were left to fend for themselves on the streets of New York City.  Most of the patients were tragic victims, a story for another day; a very few were frightening, deranged lunatics.  One man in particular became a minor media celebrity.  If memory serves me, he lived in the 57th-59th street area of midtown Manhattan.  He would become agitated and threaten people, defecate on the street regularly, and frighten the horses.  (That is not a joke; on 59th Street in Manhattan you can hire a horse and carriage to take rides through Central Park.)  When his behavior became more than the usual alarming the police would pick him up and bring him to Bellevue where he would be admitted, medicated appropriately, and discharged with plans for all sorts of follow-up in place.  Of course, once he was out of the hospital he did not adhere to any follow-up plan, returned to his residence on the streets, stopped taking his medicine and, in short order, the cycle would begin anew.  This went on for years.  At times there would be attempts made to hold him in the hospital for longer term care; this required a great deal of work by the Psychiatrists and Social Workers who had to document his history, dot every i and cross every t and would still end up disappointed as the Judges would typically mandate his release because at the moment he was no longer a threat to self or others and therefore could not be held against his will. 

All of the foregoing is interesting but what does it have to do with those in the international community who enable evil?  Just this: the fair people of New York, most of whom were and are sympathetic to the less fortunate among us, learned that there was essentially nothing they could do about this man.  The authorities, distant from the scene, from the Supreme Court to the New York legislature to the Mayor of New York (David Dinkins at the time, 1990-1993, a lovely, completely ineffectual man) had determined that in their ideal fantasy world no one should be or could be held against their will for such inconveniences as threatening their community or inconveniencing the citizenry.  It was the citizens of New York who would have to adjust to the psychotic maniacs among us, at least until they committed a crime egregious enough to warrant re-institutionalization, albeit after the crime as inmates of the prison system rather than a more humane Psychiatric system.  The citizens then determined not to see the homeless mentally ill, most of whom became invisible, and thousands of lives were worsened.

(I defy anyone to argue that living on the street in one's own filth, free to indulge in cheap alcohol and chronic terrifying paranoia, and occasionally freezing to death in the winter is more humane that being held in a facility that allows for treatment of one's psychosis, a clean environment with decent food and health care, and security from the street thugs who preyed on the helpless disturbed.  When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was elected in 1994, he instituted the "broken windows" approach to community policing; this included getting the homeless mentally ill off the streets and into SRO'a and other appropriate settings.  New York City became a boom town under Giuliani and a desirable place to live, work, and play.)

In the international community we are unfortunate enough to have a fair number of deranged and paranoid lunatics, among them North Korea, Iran, and much of the Arab/Muslim world.  They firmly believe in lunatic theories and threaten their neighbors on a regular basis.  The international community, from afar, like the Judges in Washington and the legislators in Albany and DC, weave fantasies of the world which have only a passing resemblance to the real world and then pronounce that in their fantasy land, for example, the Palestinians are merely innocent victims who only want a state in which to live peacefully with their Jewish neighbors.  They imagine themselves to be virtuous men, even courageous men speaking truth to power (since it is obvious that the non-lunatic Israelis have built a much more functional society than the Palestinians and therefor are the powerful ones in the equation) but their acquaintance with reality is tenuous at best.  However, of even greater significance, and the key point to remember, is that most of the international enablers are simply all too human cowards.  To confront the lunatic is frightening.  Lunatics tend to be unpredictable and do not operate under civilized self imposed restraints.

When "leaders" have a surfeit of the all too human characteristic of fear along with the inability to admit to themselves when they are frightened, the result is a craven mix of projection, dissimulation and rage at those who by their actions make their fear less deniable.  A politician, often the most craven of all, is by nature a cautious being.  Especially in the post-modern West, esteem does not fall upon the man who acts but on the man who speaks.  Much of the West has forgotten how to act and are afraid to act, because words have minimal (short term) consequences while deeds can not be conveniently forgotten when they go awry.   The Men of Words will never be happy with the Man of Action while the outcome is in doubt; it is only when victory is at hand that they will suddenly discover they have been behind him all along.

An Introduction to the Enablers

It is now 10 years since the Mohammed al-Dura blood libel, an episode that epitomized the Muslim propaganda template and, by virtue of the nascent new media, was eventually exposed by Philippe Karsenty, among others.   If you don't know much about the al Dura affair, in which Israel was blamed for the murder of 12 year old Mohammed al-Dura and staged and manipulated footage of the "atrocity" was shown around the world, inflaming the second intifada and demonizing Israel in the eyes of much of the world, you can peruse The Augean Stables dossier and watch this interview:

Welcome to the premiere of FrontPage Close-Up with Jamie Glazov, a new video series of provocative interviews with the leading thinkers and newsmakers of our time. Our first interview is with a hero of our modern era — Philippe Karsenty, the French media analyst who exposed the Mohammed Al-Dura Fraud, which involved France 2, a French television network, broadcasting staged footage of Israeli soldiers allegedly killing a 12-year old Palestinian, Mohammed al-Dura, during a gun battle in Gaza in 2000. See Part 1 of the interview below:

This interview, which explores the intersection and mutual reinforcement of the Palestinian propaganda structure and their Western enablers, is a good introduction to to my upcoming post on the nature of the enablers.

The Long Road to Insight, Cont.

When a society makes decisions that prove to be disastrous, just as for the person who commits himself to a course of action that has unforeseen deleterious results, altering course and admitting error can be painful and difficult.  There is a reason for the persistence of the aphorism that "paradigms change one death at a time."  Paradigms are resistant to change because it is exceptionally difficult to surrender one's worldview; it requires admitting that one had been emotionally invested in a failed paradigm and brings into question one's entire life's work and meaning.

A paradigm is a model for how the world works.  The concept of transference, the emotional constitution of one's relationships, is simply an individual's paradigm, shaped by their earliest relationships and expressed int he present, whether appropriate and accurate or not.  A society exists by enmeshing a relatively consistent and historically derived network of intersecting paradigms.  Democracies, with all their inherent flaws, work best because a free people are able to error correct, as did America last month.  If the Republicans come into power regress to their stale, failed paradigm of succor for their favored interests and neglect of the vast middle class, the people, empowered by new media, will look for a new paradigm in 2012.  In other words, the American voters have made an interpretation to their government and we will learn in the next two years whether or not the government has internalized the interpretation and changed, ie acquired insight.

Authoritarian and totalitarian states have only an extremely limited ability to acquire insights that produce shifts in their reigning paradigms.  The authoritarian state can only fail spectacularly when tis paradigm collapses in contact with reality.  Rather than deal with reality and adjust, the totalitarian and th authoritarian, like th inflexible psychotic, uses more and more pathologic defenses to avoid recognizing their own failings; when their primitive defenses fail, the result is violent.

In Pity the Poor Anti-Semite, written 4 years ago, I described how the anti-Semite's paradigm, or weltanschauung, is internally and externally contradictory and cripples his ability to exert agency.  In that post I noted the Arab/Muslim habit of demonizing (and unconsciously idealizing) their hated and feared enemies, while imbuing them with magical powers:

The article [excerpts from an article in a Syrian government run newspaper translated by MEMRI] has a compendium of other paranoid fantasies about the Jews.  It includes the canard, which unfortunately a significant percentage of the American black population believes, that Jews developed AIDS to kill blacks.  The article ends with this gem, which bears scrutiny:

"Tampering with Arab genes [without affecting] the white race is very difficult. But the Zionists are capable of attempting this [risky] adventure if [they have] a preventive treatment or a [cure for the disease]. Recall that the assassination of Yasser Arafat was carried out by means of biological weapons. The attempt on the life of the fighter [Hamas leader] Khaled Mash'al [likewise] involved a biological [agent] which [is countered by] a secret antidote that only the Zionists possess."

Not only is "tampering with Arab genes [without affecting] the white race ... very difficult", it is not possible (yet) though if it becomes possible, it is almost certain that Jewish scientists will be involved.  However, consider the implications of this idea and other common delusions/fantasies about the Jews.  Jews control international finance; they control governments behind the scenes; they have death rays, control tsunamis, etc.  The list of powers that Jews are supposed to possess are remarkable and incredible; the Jews are supermen!  Meanwhile, the poor Arabs are weak and helpless victims.  [Notice, the alternative, that Jews are a hard working group who value education, would cast the Arab world's manifest failures into an even worse light.]

...

Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation, would have the time and interest to simultaneously devote themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:

The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew. 

This resides in the core of the anti-Semite and renders him permanently damaged and weakened.  Only the aid of a being much greater than themselves, Allah, can save them from disaster.  Short of such divine intervention, they are doomed to remain defeated.  The Muslim nations of the world do not see it as within their abilities to compete in a world of high technology, higher education, competitive open economies; no, they look to nuclear weapons, only available to them by virtue of their Allah given oil money rather than by the sweat of their own brows, to bring them relief from the often imagined depredations of the now conflated Jewish/American demi-Gods. 

A great many things have changed in 4 years, yet the Arab/Muslim world shows little evidence that there has been any effort to self-reflect or question their failing paradigms.  Everyday there are stories documenting Arab projection and the concomitant demonization and (unconscious) idealization of the Jews and Americans.  Contrast this story, of how a Democracy responds to a disaster that was made worse by government ineffectuality, with how the same story played in the Arab world:

Israel's fire-fighting squadron - "Elad"

From People's Daily Online: (for some reason, I cannot find much on this in the English-language Israeli media:)

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has planned to establish a fire-fighting squadron that would operate under its command after a wild bushfire that raged through the Carmel Forest in northern Israel last week, local Ma'ariv daily reported Tuesday.

IAF Chief Maj.-Gen. Ido Nechushtan has directed military attaches abroad to inquire about various models of fire-fighting aircraft and costs, the report said.

According to a story in Firas Press, Netanyahu wants to make this a regional effort, asking Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and possibly other countries to join in a joint squadron. He discussed the idea with the prime minister of Greece who was enthusiastic about the idea and promised to bring it up to the EU.

The squadron would be named Elad, after 16-year old Elad Riven, a volunteer firefighter who lost his life fighting the flames.

Recall that the terrible loss of 40 (now 42) lives in the fire, equivalent to 2000 deaths in America, stemmed from Israeli prison guard trainees racing toward the fire to evacuate mostly Arab prisoners whose lives were in danger and then consider the Arab reaction, which included dancing in the streets celebrating the loss of Israeli lives:

PA Minister: Israel deliberately slow in saving Palestinian prisoners from forest fire

On the day of the outbreak of the Carmel forest fire in northern Israel, 40 Israelis rushing to evacuate the prisoners in the Damon prison were burned to death in the fire. After this was announced, the PA Deputy Minister of Prisoners, Ziyad Abu Ein, accused Israel of not being concerned about saving the lives of the Palestinian prisoners and being intentionally slow in moving them away from the fire zone.

The following is the interview broadcast on PATV with Ziyad Abu Ein, PA Deputy Minister of Prisoners' Affairs:

PA TV host: "Do you have information about the response speed of the Israeli Prison Service in transferring the female prisoners from the Israeli prison, or did they take their time and create a lag?"

Minister Abu Ein: "Yes, they created a lag and our [Palestinian] prisoners were endangered. Had there not been Israeli criminals or Jewish prisoners in this particular prison, it would have been even slower... If, Heaven forbid, this fire had been in the Negev, Nafha or Be'er Sheva prisons (for Palestinian security prisoners only, -ed.) there would have been an even greater danger, but the presence of hundreds of Israeli prisoners in this prison [Damon] spurred the ending [of the fire] and the evacuation of the prisoners. But still it was very slow."

The PA are the "moderate" Palestinians.  No story, whether terrible, tragic or innocuous, can not be spun by the Arab world to demonize Israel.  Whether it is Zionist sharks attacking Egyptian tourists (or Zionist dogs, pigs, wolves, lions, rats and sheep) or Jewish scientists creating tsunamis or Arab plagues, all problems in Arab lands can be attributed to the Jews.  In fact, even events that are explicitly claimed by Muslim "heroes", such as the 9/11 attacks, once determined to be potentially harmful to Muslims can then be attributed to Jews and their American allies. 

The tendency to disavow responsibility and attribute all of what is worst within their own characters to the Jews and Americans, is a hallmark of a disturbed society that lacks the ability to correct itself. 

But what about their enablers?  How can we explain the reactions of the Europeans and those who enable the externalization and projection to continue unchallenged?  That is a topic for another post.

Almost Beyond Belief

These are the geniuses who believe they have the expertise to tell us how to manage our energy policies and economy; watch, laugh, and marvel at the cluelessness of the international, and transnational, elites.  The first half is wonderful; we should be forced into a recession worse than the one we are slowly climbing out of simply because we  are defying the wisdom of the UN.  The second half is simply mind-boggling and should be savored and kept for posterity: [HT: Watts Up With That?]

 

Brilliant.

The Long Road to Insight

In Psychoanalysis we appreciate that in order for insight to be useful it must penetrate the obfuscatory barriers to our understanding and perception of unpleasant reality.  Freud's most important insight was recognizing that when we remain unaware of things that trouble us it is because parts of our mind actively work to keep unpleasant thoughts and feelings in the unconscious.  For that reason, we meet with a high frequency, tolerate frustration, appreciate the virtue of therapeutic patience and tact, and understand the need for a long period of preparation and multiple interpretations before our patients can come to appreciate their own inner workings.  Usually the insights we bring to our patients are fairly simple; for example:

Ms. L was a 27 yo graduate student when she came into treatment with complaints regarding her difficulty finding a "decent guy."  She was very attractive and had no trouble attracting men who were interested in her but they all failed her in short order and all ended up being "abusive" to her.  In short order it became obvious to me that she unconsciously discouraged more appropriate "nice guys" and encouraged those who were much less likely to value her and treat her well.  Further, once in a relationship, Ms. L found a myriad of often inventive ways to infuriate her partner; she was the compleat victim, completely unaware of how she behaved, what she found attractive in a man, and how she had an active role in the all too predictable failure of her relationships. 

For months I would find clever ways to interpret her rationalizations and defensive confusions with the goal of allowing her to see how exquisitely fine tuned her inner radar was that enabled her to find the most perfectly inappropriate man with whom to become involved.  She consistently told me I was being too analytic (wasn't that what she was paying me for?) and that I had no idea what I was talking about.  Obviously, M (the current man of the hour) was perfect for her; he (and I) just didn't realize it and, typical of all men, we could both be easily manipulated into taking proper care of her.  After months of what felt like hitting my head against the wall, she finally gave me an opportunity to reshape the interpretations of her unconscious desire to be damaged.  She came in a few minutes late and was uncharacteristically silent for some time.  (Silences in therapy always feel longer to the patient than the therapist.)  When she began to talk she made no mention of her unusual lateness nor of her silence.  After a few minutes of bland conversation I wondered aloud if she had any thoughts about how the session started.  She started to cry; in halting speech she told me that prior to the session she had been sitting in a nearby coffee shop having her lunch and found herself in a reverie involving M.  In her daydream, which started off perfectly pleasantly, she imagined him taking her away to a wonderful vacation; he wined her and dined her.  Yet, unbidden, her reverie took a dark turn.  In her daydream he took her back to their room, began to berate her, then slapped her, and then raped her.  She was horrified and horribly ashamed.  She didn't want to tell me about it; she didn't want to admit she could have such fantasies.  She remembered having exactly such fantasies as a young girl and hated that they had always excited her.  She knew if she told me it would make her masochism real.  In fact, she had known for a long time that she had these memories, these unacceptable fantasies, but had hoped she would never have to acknowledge them, even as a part of her knew she would never get better until she did.

This was a simple bit of insight.  Ms. L had to acknowledged she had masochistic tendencies and fantasies before she could even begin to deal with her relationship difficulties.  Note that my interpretation was merely a question that had nothing overtly to do with masochism yet the subtext was that she was in the session, coming to me for help, and not talking about something important, in effect harming herself for reasons that were unclear.  The fact that we had months of preparatory interpretations without which none of this would have emerged is a reflection of the hard work involved in helping people change.

I have used this blog as a way to try to understand the behavior of large groups, ie societies, in ways analogous to how an individual's mind works.  Societies keep themselves unaware of conflicted and unacceptable realities.  They do this in many ways including by impeding their own perceptions, ie by interfering with their societal perceptual apparatus, the media.  Reality has a habit of, eventually, asserting itself, and those assertions act as interpretive statements for the society.  Barack Obama and the liberal democrats recently received an unhappy interpretation; time will tell if they are able to appreciate the interpretation and move closer to reality, ie the majority of the country does not want nor can we tolerate, what they have to offer.  In the international arena, there is always room for interpretation but the most disturbed societies have the most trouble perceiving them.  That is the subject for a future post.