Appealing to a Higher Court

            Although the Supreme Court has allowed the Affordable Health Care Act to stand, there are those who still contend that, like birth control and artificial insemination, the act is against the Natural Law, as developed primarily in the Christian tradition over two millennia.  Amherst legal scholar Hadley Arkes has been a prime advocate of this view in numerous articles, including  “Natural Rights Trumps Obamacare, Or Should” in the magazine First Things, December 2011.  As a card-carrying Jesuit fellow traveler, I couldn’t help trying my hand at a response.  For those of you interested, here’s what I had to say:

            Five hundred years before Christ, Heraclitus observed, “although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.” Heraclitus’s Logos, like the Dao or the Natural Law (mutatis mutandis), defines the principles which govern the universe, and from which humans stray at their peril. Hadley Arkes’s natural law challenge to America’s health care plan substitutes a private intelligence for well-defined principles of natural law, possibly to identify the author’s position with more universal concepts than a particular constitutional theory.

The challenge needs to be examined on several levels. At the highest, is there a reasoned basis for believing that natural law is incompatible with universal health care? Is there consensus among natural law authorities, or in common practice, for this belief? Finally, assuming no disqualifying argument against universal health care, is there evidence that such a system would be inferior to the prior one as regards its effect on the natural rights of Americans?

Arkes evidently perceives two ways in which mandated health care violates natural law. The first is that the law abrogates a specific natural right. Quoting a recent legal brief, Arkes maintains that “Imposing on people a contract they do not want would be quite as wrong as dissolving, without their consent, a contract they had knowingly made.” Oddly, the statement is itself entirely correct, but the implication drawn from it entirely wrong. As a citizen, I have multiple contracts imposed on me that I may or may not want: to pay taxes, to contribute to Social Security and Medicare, to serve my country if called in time of war, to support any children I may have helped conceive, and on and on. I may also have contracts I have knowingly made dissolved without my consent, including both unlawful contracts (e.g. murder for hire), contracts lawful but restricted (e.g. bigamous marriages), and contracts entirely lawful but overridden by the concerns of the state (e.g. property contracts abrogated by eminent domain).

Arkes’s second, more powerful objection is based on the possibility that mandated health care would impinge upon the fundamental right to life. Arkes makes this contention twice, first asserting, “The generous provision of care to the poor would come along with controls that could deny to ordinary people the medical care they would regard as necessary to the preservation of their own lives, perhaps even when they were willing to pay for that care themselves,” and again, “this scheme of national medical care is virtually bound to produce a scheme of rationing, as it has produced that rationing in Britain and Canada, denying medical care to people now entirely reliant on the government for their care. The serious question then is whether this denial to people of the means to preserve their own lives, with means quite legitimate, touches the ground of natural rights. 

I believe that it does.”

This position, though dramatically stated, totters on not one, but four cracked legs. First, it contends that these harms “could,” and more strongly are “virtually bound” to happen, offering in evidence only that they have allegedly come about in two other counties. This contention can be challenged in two ways. Empirically, there are more than thirty countries with universal health care, so experience in two is not proof of inevitability, or even likelihood. But there is also a rational objection. Actions that have a possible, or even highly likely, outcome may be entirely permissible if precautions can be taken to avoid the outcome, or if the action is the only apparent way to avoid a worse result. A surgery virtually bound to result in the death of a patient may still be ethical, even when the patient is physically unable to give consent, if it is deemed to be the patient’s only hope. A rescue effort likely to result in the death of the rescuer is still legitimate, even heroic, when the same action (plunging into a raging torrent, for example), would be suicidal if not for the intent of the rescuer.

Even if rationing were to evolve, it need not deny people “the means to preserve their own life.” A society may deny orthopedic or other corrective surgery for very elderly patients or others whose lives are minimally affected by their physical limitation, yet offer all available interventions to patients with life-threatening diseases.

Further, no system could leave people “entirely reliant on the government for their care,” unless it were combined with draconian regulations against travel that would themselves be against all contemporary standards of natural rights. This last point deserved further examination, particularly in light of the rationale for adopting universal health care.

            Here, to invert Anatole France’s quip that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread,” we can say the law equally allows rich and poor to travel abroad for health care denied them at home. Even today, large numbers of Americans – estimates range as high as 1.3 million – seek medical care abroad. Some even travel to Canada, especially to the Shouldice Hospital for hernia care, as well as to Mexico, Thailand, and other countries. Estimates of global medical tourism run into the several millions.

While the wealthy – or even comfortable, since an international trip plus treatment may cost less than the same in a U.S. hospital – could seek whatever means of life preservation they desire, those now unable to afford medical care would be assured of the means to preserve life, at least to a greater extent than under the present system.

If there is no rational conflict between universal health care and natural law, does informed opinion favor that position? Apparently not. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has consistently described universal health care as both a right of persons and a duty of governments. As Richard McBrien noted in the National Catholic Reporter (October 5, 2009), “The teaching that health care is a right rather than a privilege was articulated by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical, Pacem in Terris....The pope began that encyclical with a list of rights, the first set of which pertained to the right to life and a worthy standard of living. Included in these rights were the right to ‘food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest and finally the necessary social services.’” More recently, Catholic News Service reported, “Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders said it was the moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay. Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the ‘inalienable rights’ of man.” (November 18, 2010) The same view has been consistently held by the American hierarchy, as in recent testimony before Congress: “As national debate about a major Congressional health care bill continues, the U.S. bishops have called for ‘genuine’ health care reform that protects human life and provides comprehensive health care access. Bishop of Rockville Centre, New York William F. Murphy, writing a July 17 letter to Congress on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), commented: ‘Genuine health care reform that protects the life and dignity of all is a moral imperative and a vital national obligation.’” (Catholic News Agency, July 22, 2009).

            This last item suggests a further place to seek common wisdom regarding natural law and health care. As implied by Bishop Murphy, natural law requires respect for human life from conception. We might therefore suppose that state opposition to abortion and to universal health care would go hand in hand. Yet the eleven European countries – all with overwhelming Catholic or Orthodox majorities –prohibiting abortion all provide universal health care, as do the four largest South American (and Catholic) countries prohibiting abortion.

            If the rational case against universal health care lacks substance, and the weight of opinion among Christian leaders and nations favors such care, can we examine empirically whether mandated health care in fact tends toward the preservation of natural rights?  

            If as Professor Arkes correctly notes, the ability to preserve life “with means quite legitimate” is a part of natural law, the current America health system is far worse than those of most developed countries at preserving that right. (A problem arises, of course, when “legitimate” is introduced into a discussion based on natural law. Certain means of preserving life, such as killing another to provide yourself with a lifesaving part of that person’s body, may be illegitimate. Many forms of legitimacy, however, are arbitrary decisions of governments or societies, and may have some, or no, basis in natural law. A Hindu, for example, may find killing a cow to provide life-saving human nourishment to be illegitimate, without in any way deriving this decision from natural law.)

            Not only is American life expectancy lower than in 19 of 23 European, North American, and Pacific countries, and newborn mortality levels and indices of child well-being equally low or lower, but we “lead” the rest of the civilized world in the number of people who die of curable illnesses before age 75, and trail in years of healthy life expectancy for those over 60. During this century, each of these countries, even financially beleaguered Greece, have reduced deaths from amenable causes (so-called “avoidable mortality”) at rates at least twice as fast as has the U.S. Journalist T.R. Reid observed in 2010 that “Government and academic studies reported that more than 20,000 Americans die in the prime of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they can’t afford to see a doctor.”  More than 100,000 avoidable deaths occur each year in America, from this and other causes.

            Given these facts, can we understand, if not agree, with Professor Arkes’s position? Several of his points offer a possible answer. Although the phrase “natural law” appears prominently at the beginning of his article, it is far from central to his case. The term itself appears only seven times in the text (as opposed to 24, for example, for “government” and 15 for “constitution”). He focuses primarily on Constitutional law, historical precedents and concern for “the vast enlargement of the reach and powers of the state.” Despite his title, he openly states that “the most serious argument against Obamacare is that it threatens to change the American regime in a grave way: that it sweeps past the constitutional restraints intended to ensure a federal government ‘limited’ in its ends, confined to certain ‘enumerated’ powers, and respecting a domain of local responsibilities that it has no need or rationale for displacing.” 



            These arguments are serious ones, and can and should stand on their own, rather than attempting to climb onto the shoulders of the natural law. But beneath a commitment to originalism and limited government is an unexamined premise with greater explanatory power.

In invoking the natural law Arkes speaks entirely of natural rights, and never mentions natural duties. However, in such sources as the Catholic Encyclopedia, natural law is identified with duties, rather than rights. (Not to deny that duties and rights are often obverse and reverse of the same principle.)  In Arkes’s rights-focused (dare we say libertarian?) discussion, an individual right to preserve life is paramount, but the duty to see that others’ lives are preserved is nowhere mentioned. This and the off-hand assertion of “a natural right not be coerced into buying things we have no wish to buy,” and fears of government power, all suggest that the individual’s right to make choices is the foundation of Arkes’s edifice.

It may be more than a linguistic anomaly that this places the natural law argument on the “pro-choice” side. For in espousing a radical (in the etymological if not the political sense) commitment to individual choice, Arkes aligns himself with one of the chief ailments of our age.  As David Bentley Hart observes in Atheist Delusions, “In even our gravest political and ethical debates—regarding economic policy, abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, censorship, genetic engineering, and so on—‘choice’ is a principle not only frequently invoked, by one side or both, but often seeming to exercise an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns.”  It should not exercise such supremacy over health care for all Americans.

           

Evolution Makes Me Do It

            However it may be challenged technically, Karl Popper’s idea that an argument or hypothesis needs to be falsifiable in order to be judged as scientific is a useful thought tool.  My father used to say, for example, that superstitious people could never be persuaded of their errors because they could always come up with a defense of their belief.  If their rabbit’s foot didn’t bring good luck, he explained, they would say it was the wrong foot, cut off at the wrong time, or whatever else worked for them.  People who believe the world will end on a certain date usually wake up the morning after convinced they just need to reread the texts or redo the calculations, or that they prayed the problem away.

            Evolutionary explanations, when over-applied, follow the same illogic.  Fidelity and infidelity, kindness and cruelty, altruism and selfishness, monogamy and polygamy, all have “good” evolutionary explanations.  Why?  Because no mental or physical condition or behavior could exist if it didn’t provide an evolutionary advantage.  So all we have to do is come up with a logical-sounding, untestable theory, and we’ve “explained” it in evolutionary terms.

            There are, however, serious objections to this line of thinking.  The first, of course, is that any explanation that can’t be falsified is no explanation at all.  Evolutionary theorists provide an evolutionary “explanation” for any human trait, including its opposite.  All such theories are based on conjecture, some of it supported to a degree by brain science, others simply guesswork.  Take optimism and pessimism for example.

            According to Tali Sharot in The Optimism Bias  “It is tempting to speculate that optimism was selected for during evolution precisely because positive expectations enhance the probability of survival.  The fact that optimists live longer and are healthier, combined with statistics indicating that most humans display optimistic biases, together with recent data linking optimism to specific genes, strongly supports this hypothesis.”  So evolution selected for optimism because it made people hopeful, perhaps they overcame setbacks more readily – and perhaps a cheerful spouse was more appealing than a gloomy one (because, of course, the partner recognized that a cheerful spouse was a better bet to live longer and be more fertile, or at least more enthusiastic about procreation). 

            So why are there so many pessimists around?  Well, according to http://ironshrink.com,

“Pessimism, like snake and spider phobias, may be an adaptation that promotes survival. Our ancestors would have been poorly served by joyfully sniffing every flower while they were hunting for lunch. Better they should have assumed that the world is a dangerous place. A bit of well-placed pessimism would lead them to watch for predators, pitfalls, and creepy-crawlies. But more than sensitizing our ancestors to dangers, pessimism helped to solve problems. According to psychologist Robert Leahy, “pessimism, avoidance, and retreat” were frequently the best strategies for survival in the primitive environment.”

            Likewise, once theorists had established to their satisfaction that “fight or flight” was ingrained in us by selection processes, others decided that “tend and befriend” was just as useful, and was also selected for.  A recent piece I read even suggested that gossip had an evolutionary advantage.  That seems puzzling to me.  To gossip you need two things: language and secrets.  Is it really possible that we developed language and closed doors among hunter-gatherers who were in each other’s company 24-7 far enough back in evolutionary time to allow gossip to be selected for?  I rather think that gossip would be likelier to get the gossiper killed at a time when secrets would have been hard to keep and the reaction of a pissed-off neighbor whose sexual prowess had been under discussion was likely to have been a rock or a club.

            And on the theories go.  Homosexuality is, of course, a giant stumbling block, since it seems the perfect evolutionary disadvantage.  But this doesn’t stop the ingenious evolutionist.  Maybe being gay makes you more available to help raise your siblings’ kids, and so perpetuates your genes.  (The perfect family: Mom and Dad, Uncle Bruce and Uncle Randy, Aunt Butch and Aunt Biker, and ten or so little ones perpetuating a whole bundle of everyone’s genes.)  Or else, men who are more “feminine” are appealing to women as nurturers, and so may get in ahead of Mr. Macho, even if they’re only slightly interested in the ladies.  (I suppose the correlate is that tough women appealed to men because they could handle the saber-tooth better and save the kids while dad’s out bringing home the wart hog bacon.)

            And here’s the perfect evolutionary out – maybe it’s sort of an accident.  Maybe fairly delicate and kind men are appealing, but in some cases the genes just go overboard and -- whoops – no gene survival for Uncle Bruce.  Though evolutionists seem to have abandoned the old stories about elks whose antlers got too big for them to walk, this out is always available, and further illustrates the “I can explain everything” nature of overdone evolutionary theory.

            Accidents are the latest form of the evolutionary escape clause. If any sort of minimally plausible evolutionary reason can be given for something existing in humans today, then that proves the point.  However when forced into a non-advantageous corner (think appendices, blind spots in the eye, and other anomalies), then the case falls back on the Kluge factor, to quote Gary Marcus’s title for his book, subtitled “The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.”  Lots of stuff, like Topsy, just grew, because it had to make do with what was available at the evolutionary moment.  So on the one hand, we have no need for a Designer, because evolution can do the job all by itself.  Furthermore, the fact that evolution does a poor job, giving us nipples on men, sickle cell, bad backs, bum knees, and other irritations, is a second proof that there isn’t a Designer.  For me, both God and Evolution are equally likely to be misused as conversation-stopping Theories of Everything.

The Consistency of Sludge

We English majors are used to hearing consistency damned and inconsistency extolled.  From Shakespeare to Fitzgerald, writers have commented on the value of contradiction.  Shakespeare loved to embody two opposite points of view in his characters, and let the audience decide whether one or both made sense.  So, in King Lear the Duke of Gloucester, determined to give up and die, says to his son Edgar: No further, sir. A man may rot even here.”  Edgar replies, “What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all. Come on. Gloucester concedes, “And that's true too.”  And they exit.

Fast forward to the nineteenth century.  Keats praised the capacity of “negative capability, by which he meant “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”  Emerson called “a foolish consistency…the hobgoblin of little minds,” and Whitman proudly asked, “Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  I am large; I contain multitudes.”  Even more recently, F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Philosophers, scientists, and others have made progress through inconsistency.  Wittgenstein revolutionized philosophy twice, starting two different schools of thought with his Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations.  Freud threw out hypothesis after hypothesis, and some of them stuck.           

But when it comes to politics, inconsistency is rarely a virtue.  An April Fool’s parody I found on Zite, for example, explained that Mitt Romney is the first “quantum candidate.”  He can be both a conservative and a liberal the way light can be both a wave and a particle, and you can’t locate both his position and his velocity at any given moment.  (Wait, maybe it wasn't a parody at all.)

But what’s really on my mind is that a number of Republican representatives recently stepped up to explain why we should continue oil subsidies.  The basic argument?  If we didn’t subsidize oil, prices would go up.  Then people would have to pay more at the pump.

The more I thought about this, the stranger I found it.  Aren’t Republicans the people who object to any interference with the free market?  And don’t subsidies interfere with the free market’s magic mantra of supply and demand?  (Never mind that gasoline doesn’t seem to follow the rules anyway.  In the past several years we have increased U.S. oil production, decreased gasoline use, and nearly doubled gas prices.) 

The strangest thing about the Republican position, though, is that it removes choice from the equation.  If the government subsidizes the oil companies, everyone pays, even those who have no car, heat with wood, and stay as far away from fossil fuels as they can.  But if oil prices rise, most of us have a choice whether to buy oil products of not: smaller cars, public transportation, more walking, lowering the house temperature, using fans instead of air conditioning.  (Obviously, big industries have a good deal less choice, so they benefit much less from the free market approach.)

We’re engaged in a debate about whether the government can force us to buy health insurance, but the same people who think that’s a dreadful infringement on our rights think nothing of forcing us to pay for oil and gas that we have no intention of using.  And you wonder why a reader weeps?

They've Blinded Us With Science

                  Like many before me, I attended both a college and a graduate school which bore, and still bear, the title schools “of Arts and Sciences.”  Those two terms have carried many meanings over the years.  Scientists, after all;, did not call themselves scientists until less than 200 years ago.  (They were commonly known as “natural philosophers” back then.)  But with modifiers like “fine and applied” for arts, and “natural and social” for sciences, it was pretty clear, for example, that the English and music majors, the painters and sculptors, were in a different phylum from the physics, biology, and chemistry majors, however ambiguously the psychologists, sociologists, and economists might see themselves.

                  Today, however, it seems that even the most unscientific of the arts are being probed by the scientists’ instruments, and in the process are providing explanations that appear to fall into two pots of fool’s gold: the “it took a study to show that?” pot and the “Oh come now” pot, both of which should be put out with the trash.

                  In the “it took a study” bucket, we have science telling artists and their devotees things we might have thought were already pretty well known.  Take this headline from the Wall Street Journal, “Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker: Why does Adele's ‘Someone Like You’ make everyone cry? Science has found the formula.”

Actually, there are two formulas, one musico-psychological and the other neuroscientific.  First, the Journal informs us:

“Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an ‘appoggiatura.’

“An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. ‘This generates tension in the listener,’ said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “‘When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.’”

The clue to the waste of experimenter’s time and salary comes in a single word, “appoggiatura.”  The scientists didn’t invent the term, or the device.  It’s linguistically over 250 years old, and in practice is much older than that.  In fact, the ancient Greeks had already figured out the emotional valence of different types of music, as is evident from Plato’s Republic, where Socrates asks which musical modes are unsuitable for a rational society’s guardians and warriors:

 “What, then, are the dirge-like modes of music?  Tell me, for you are a musician.”
 “The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lydian, and similar modes.
 “These, then, said I, we must do away with.  But again, drunkenness is a thing most unbefitting guardians, and so is softness and sloth.
 “Yes.
 “What, then, are the soft and convivial modes?
 There are certain Ionian and also Lydian modes that are called lax.
 “Will you make any use of them for warriors?
 “None at all.”

               

   Part Two comes when we stop asking people questions and peer into their crania to tell them what’s “really” going on.  Again, according to the Journal:

                  “If "Someone Like You" produces such intense sadness in listeners, why is it so popular? Last year, Robert Zatorre and his team of neuroscientists at McGill University reported that emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.

                  “Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song.

                  With "Someone Like You," Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.”

                  Now certainly it’s true that we release dopamine in the brain in many situations.  But, as the article previously noted of this dopamined state, “Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.”  So we have two bits of data: appoggiaturas give us goose bumps, and goose bumps are a sign of dopamine release.  All that’s left out is that annoying matter of “depending on the context.”  That’s where the complete human being comes in: interpreting the lyrics (remember them?), seeing or visualizing the singer, connecting what’s happening to past musical, and even more important, life experiences, all contribute to our emotional response.  Compare this to the rat who learns to tap a button to get a shot of dopamine and gives up everything else to keep the highs coming.   

At the other end of the rainbow of scientific over-analysis is the “how could anyone think that one up?” pot of fool’s gold.  My favorite example of this comes from noted neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran.  His theory: much art, especially modern cubism and other forms of art, can be neurobiologically explained.  He has set out to answer the question, “Why does art work?”  and has come up with an approach that aims to reduce art to a science.  In the words of Psychology Today, “All the adjectives we use to describe art—vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”—should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing inherently mysterious about art. Its visual tricks can be decoded. Neuroaestheticians hope to reveal ‘the universal laws’ of painting and sculpture, to find the underlying principles shared by every great work of visual art.” 

I’m reminded of the snippet LP collections of my youth that offered “Great Moments in Music.”  The idea was that certain fragments of every great piece of music were really what the listener wanted, so you could get the best of everyone from Bach to Tchaikovsky in just a few grooves by cutting them to a few bars apiece.  That was followed by a parody, “Great Square Inches in Art,” which proposed to offer God’s finger from the Sistine Chapel, a Dali melting clock, and all the other essential bits of  art throughout the ages.

The first thing to suggest is that maybe there are no “universal laws.”  That is an idea ripped from physics and some parts of biology in particular, and mis-transferred to fields where it may not fit at all.  For example, is there a universal law of food?  Only if you lump the need for protein, calories, hydration, roughage, and all the vitamins and trace minerals needed for health into a single category.  Just the fact that one culture adores spices or rotted food and another abhors them should make clear that universal law doesn’t always apply.

The thesis appears to be that a form of visual “hyperbole” attracts our attention, and therefore many kinds of art exaggerate features of their subject – Easter Island megaliths, El Grecos, African art, and so forth.  But even realistic art alters reality, since painting at least is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality (except when it isn’t), and so is some sort of brain stimulant.  When it comes to hyperbole, not much can beat Ramachandran’s seagull theory, which goes as follows: gulls have evolved to peck at a red spot on their mother’s beak in order to get food.  Studies show that a gull will peck at a red spot on a stick, and will go into overdrive when offered a stick with three red dots.  The gull just has to do it, since the stimulus evokes the response just as surely as a tap below the knee makes your lower leg jump. This use by the scientists of “deliberate hyperbole” (if that’s what adding extra dots is), Ramachandran offers as the perfect analogy to, indeed the explanation of, art’s appeal.  As he puts it:

"If herring gulls had an art gallery, they would hang a long stick with three red strips on the wall; they would worship it, pay millions of dollars for it, call it a Picasso, but not understand why they are mesmerized by it. That's all any art lover is doing when buying contemporary art: behaving exactly like those gull chicks."

Beware of anyone telling you that A is exactly like B.  It usually isn’t: a lot like A, somewhat like A, like A in this respect, but hardly ever exactly like A.  Even identical twins aren’t exactly alike. (Oddly, this seems to be pretty much an argument by analogy, an approach that has consistently been debunked by science as a rhetorical way of making us understand a point rather than a true demonstration of anything).  How is the art lover unlike the gull?  Well, for one thing, he’s a distinct minority among his fellow humans.  Not everyone is mesmerized by “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Nude Descending a Staircase.”  No art form, or at least no particular manifestation of it, is universally appreciated by all humans.  Art goes in and out of fashion, gradually gains acceptance, sometimes needs to be explained before it can be appreciated, and so forth.  Nor are we incapable of understanding why we are mesmerized by it.  If we were, art criticism and even personal comment would be fruitless. 

Can you imagine, for example, a gull art critic explaining that blue dots were now in, or that pecking at dots was so passé, everyone is pecking at triangles now?  Or a coterie of gulls exalting or excoriating the newest school of stick art?  For better or worse, we humans change our minds frequently about aesthetic appeal, and we learn from others and from our own experience in a way no gull ever has.

Maybe there’s something to be learned from these studies, however.  I propose a new field for exploration: the neurobiological and evolutionary underpinnings that explain the behavior of neurobiologists and other scientists.  Note an essential similarity between the two theories: in each we humans have responses that we don’t understand, based on events happening in our brain, events connected to such basic needs as food and pleasure (which of course are connected  back to such basis needs as survival or reproduction).  Scientists, therefore, happily point our that we are all much simpler than we thought we were.  Except, of course, for the scientist, whose superiority is demonstrated by their insight.

I propose that a study be funded to learn what neurobiological reactions occur in the mind of a scientist (or indeed any researcher or other academic), when he or she comes upon an apparently novel explanation for a familiar phenomenon.  Is there a dopamine rush?  An adrenaline boost?  A cortisol drop?  Are these reactions greater or stronger when the idea is more or less plausible, or is the subject blind to probability in such moments?  Studies should examine whether at such times the subjects have other behaviors that indicate diminished capacity for judgment.  In other words, does this high make them temporarily stupid?  And finally, we should explore a possible evolutionary advantage to the creation of such explanations.  These individuals, after all, inhabit a very peculiar environmental niche.  Like Galapagos birds, or Australian marsupials, they may have evolved distinct survival strategies suited to their ivory towers.  Does the boost of self-confidence make them more attractive to potential mates?  Is this effect enhanced  by publication, giving new meaning to the old mantra “publish or perish”?  Or are the effects mediated by further steps: promotion, higher salary, media appearances, the chance to join a more prestigious pack in a different ivory tower?  Only a truly scientific study can give us the answers.

 

                 

                 

Back to School

In January I returned to the classroom as a student for the first consequential time since 1970.  I had taken a few non-credit courses, but hadn’t paid for classes that would qualify me for something if and only if I succeeded. (In fact, I had had an almost complete free ride through scholarships in my first education. I'll pay nearly twenty times more for this program than my parents or I did for all my prior schooling.)

Specifically, I enrolled at the McCormack School for Policy and International Studies of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to obtain certification in Mediation and Conflict Resolution.  That meant applying for admission, selecting a mix of required and optional courses, and beginning classes with attendance, participation, and assessment standards.   Eight short papers and two long, a team project, plus grades for classroom participation and points off for absences.

How’s it going?  Not bad at all, but…

The biggest challenge comes not from the classes, but from being part of a large metropolitan university in the twenty-first century.  UMass is a pile of interconnected buildings, linked by a second-story catwalk.  If you walk that catwalk from the near end to the far, you’ve traveled over a third of a mile; if you visit all the side passages to different buildings, it’s easily a mile round trip.  Most buildings have multiple branching corridors off central lobbies, and room designations like Science S-02-0125.  So I got extra-good workouts getting lost the first few days, and still can burn plenty of calories by “mall walking” before and after class.

Then there’s the cyber university.  In order to register and receive communications, you need to log into three different systems: one for classes and business matters, a second for e-mail, and a third for assignments and grades.  These do not all have the same password, naturally.  Then there are the assignments, which require you to set up a Dropbox account.  And finally, to submit papers, some professors prefer google docs.  It only took me three weeks or so to navigate the virtual campus, and I still worry that my papers have been transported from my desk, but as happened occasionally on Star Trek, have not landed on the intended planet.

As one who had literally never taken a class in a public institution in my life (Catholic elementary and secondary schools, Boston College, Harvard Grad and Divinity Schools, Episcopal Theological, Boston University and Harvard Law), I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.  But the faculty are excellent and responsive, class size in the low twenties, assignments rigorous but not overwhelming (40 to 80 pages a week), and discussions lively and engaging.  Each night I arrive ate 6:00, and am usually surprised when we knock off at 8:30.

My classmates range from professionals at or near my own age to new graduate students young enough to be my grandchildren.  The group is more diverse than any I have ever studied with, and we all seem to get along very well.  Both teachers have set up a roster for providing snacks at break, which helps in a program where everyone dashes in after work and rushes home each night.

Best of all, I find that fifty-plus years of prior education and life experience actually are helping me put it all in context.  Often I find myself wishing I had known some of these approaches when dealing with parents, colleagues, and employees during my years in education, but the writing assignments in particular are a pleasure because they allow scope for bringing personal and other experiences into the discussion. Best of all, I have the time to delve deeply, using the internet, my past reading, and my recollections to push beyond the minimum.

My conclusion?  School age is every age, and “life-long learning” is much more than a trite phrase.  Just find a young person to help you through the mazes of the virtual and the actual school.

When You're Right, You're Right

I've sometimes picked on Harvard in this blog, and though I'm sure I haven't harmed their stature or endowment, I think I owe it to them and myself to commend them sometimes as well.  This blog piece, which I first read on Zite, is a true gem -- anyone who reads it and has to give a commencement speech will probably steal it (I hope with proper attribution to Mr. Haque).

Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

In Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert wryly observes that “psychologists…take a vow, promising that, at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: ‘The human being is the only animal that…’ We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.”  Noting several refuted hypotheses (e.g. uses tools or language), he goes on to say that “it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.”  Psychologists aren't the only social scientists who run the risk of premature generalization, as this post will prove.

Lately I’ve been reading several books that lie along the border of psychology and economics – Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, all of which provide a lot of evidence that our abilities to predict the future, and even to act rationally in the present, are a lot poorer than we imagine.  Yet this never prevents stock market “experts” and management theorists from making a killing by confidently labeling businesses and their leaders successful or promising, flawed or doomed.  The danger with all these judgments, of course, comes when you make them before the fat lady has sung – because contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are plenty of second acts in American lives, and often Act II turns the expectations of Act I on their heads.

Take Charismatic Leadership in Organizations, by Jay A. Conger and Rabindra N. Kanungo, published in 1998.   Chapter 7, “The Shadow Side of Charisma,” begins, “Although we have emphasized throughout this volume the positive face of charismatic leadership, it has at times produced disastrous outcomes for both followers and organizations.”  True enough.  In fact, only three years later, Jim Collins’s Good to Great swung the pendulum of popular thinking decisively against charisma, showing that in the 10 “great” companies he and his investigators had found, one common factor was leaders who were “quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, understated…and so forth.”  Collins also noted that “in two thirds of the comparison cases, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

Unfortunately, as the old newsreels used to say, “Time Marches On.”  With time,  Collins’s list of  great companies has come under severe scrutiny; by 2006, the average GtoG company was not in the Fortune Top 200.

Likewise, Conger and Kanungo went on to describe “positive” and “negative” charismatic leaders.  One of their key definitions was that “The negative charismatic leaders point their efforts toward achieving the goal of self-aggrandizement, whereas the positive charismatic leaders develop self-discipline to endure the personal risk or cost of benefitting others.”    Negative charismatic leaders create “goals that are largely self-serving,” and do not accurately estimate resources, support, or the larger (market) environment.  Finally, only the most positive leaders “recognize their own ‘organizational mortality,”’ and prepare properly for a succession of leadership.

In the abstract, all these points are well taken.  However Conger and Kanungo were betrayed by the need to concretize the principles with examples.  Here they run into the problem recognized by Einstein (and, oddly, attributed to Yogi Berra by over 10% of those who quote it): “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

The Internet, or course, gives a reader an unfair leg up on published writers, because any one of us can bring the discussion up to date with a few clicks.   After noting one case of a premature death notice, which I will discuss momentarily, I began to look up other examples to see how the leader and/or company fared after Conger and Kanungo’s judgment.

One such example was Lucent ‘s Henry Schacht, described as a charismatic but instrumental leader who was highly successful in planning for and mentoring a successor.  During Schacht’s brief tenure as head of the newly formed technology company, he named his successor immediately, and “assumed the principal role of teaching and coaching, helping [his designated successor, Rich] McGinn and his team to be more effective in building the senior team’s collective identity.” Starting with his accession in October 1997, McGinn then built his team with a further succession in mind.

But life, and markets, are what happens when you’re busy making other plans.  Exactly three years later, McGinn was fired by the board, and Schacht returned in an effort to save the sinking company.  Lucent’s stock, which had hit a high of $103 a share a few months after McGinn’s succession, was now trading at $27.  Two Octobers later it was a penny stock, at 55 cents a share, and had admitted a $125 million accounting error and several other dubious accounting and sales practices. It was later acquired by the French firm Alcatel. (Sources: NY Times, 2/28/1998; CNET News, October 23, 2000; CFO.com December 18, 2002; Kiplinger’s, May 2003). 

On the opposite side of the coin, Conger and Kanungo singled out one CEO above all as a model of the negative charismatic leader. They labeled this CEO both charismatic and narcissistic, a “particularly potent and dangerous” combination. They cite another author as saying the man “has a tendency to surround himself with people who, though talented, aren’t likely to question his vision.”  Like other narcissistic leaders (John deLorean and Lee Iacocca are mentioned), he often claimed credit for others’ ideas.   This person’s “visions became increasingly a reflection of personal obsessions rather than what the marketplace was seeking.”  After an initial success, his company’s market shares collapsed, and he blundered into expensive failure after expensive failure because he “could not defy the laws of the marketplace or ignore the dictates of the business he was in, no matter how passionately he viewed himself as being above such dictates.”

This paragon of egomania and market-blindness?  One “Steven” Jobs as the authors called him, who had just returned to Apple as interim CEO and who had nearly 15 years of unparalleled marketing and creative success ahead of him.  (A few weeks before his death, Apple had a market capitalization larger than Google and Microsoft combined, and the quarter that began with his death was Apple’s best ever.  Close the books on Mr. Jobs’s career, with a pretty positive balance sheet.)

This is not to say that Messrs. Conger and Kanungo are unusual in their inability to judge the future by the past. They’re just like the rest of us, this writer included.  But their story, like so many others, shows the common tendency to persuade ourselves that our theory can account for all contingencies (what Daniel Kahneman calls the WYSIATI or “what you see is all there is” fallacy), and of assuming that past performance is a guarantee of future results.