My own Shangri-Las

“No utopia has ever been described in which any sane man would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape.”                                                                                    -- Alexander Gray

            While Gray may be right about the utopias of social engineers, from Plato to Skinner, I think many of us would be happy to live in the worlds created by imaginative writers, past and present.  As a boy, I lost myself in King Arthur’s and Robin Hood’s England, Tarzan’s Africa, Arthur Ransome’s Swallowdale, and many others.  C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came later and lasted much longer; I still dip into their Otherworlds occasionally.

            But these days I have less interest in dwelling among knights, apes, fauns or hobbits, and more in imagining plausible communities of ordinary, or not so ordinary, humans who promise a richer moral and social life than exists in contemporary America.  In my reading over the past few years I’ve found three such imaginary places, all of which I share with others as often as possible.  Two are from the frequently underestimated world of mystery writing, and one from a master of the short story, the novel, the essay, and the lyric poem.

            To start with the detectives, my first recommendation is  P.A. Gaus’s Amish mysteries.  Gaus, a college professor in Ohio’s Amish country (despite Pennsylvania’s greater prominence, Ohio’s Amish population is equally large), has written seven – and counting – mysteries in which the pacific world of the Amish is rent by violence, and three “English” characters (as the Amish call all outsiders), come to their assistance.  The primary one of these is, oddly enough, a local college professor, ironically, of military history.  (Gaus himself was a chemist until his recent retirement; obviously no connection there.) 

Along with his alter ego, the irascible local sheriff, and occasional help from a non-Amish pastor and carpenter, Professor Michael Branden often takes on himself the burden of protecting those who will not fight either to avenge or to defend themselves. In one novel, an Amish bishop explains why his people believe so completely in non-violence:  “We are taught that we are to be harmless as doves.  It means a lot of things, but one thing is that the harm we do is always harmful to us, if for no other reason than the guilt that we shoulder for it.”   Like HBO’s The Newsroom,” some will find these books “preachy,” but in my view they’re none the worse for that, and the leaven of crime and mystery can attract even readers who may slide over the homilies – to their own detriment.  (The novels, beginning with The Blood of the Prodigal, are published by Plume.)

A more secular Shangri-la can be found in the woods of southern Quebec, in Louise Penny’s Three Pines, the setting of another ongoing series featuring Inspector Armande Gamache of the Sureté de Quebec (the Chief Inspector for the whole Francophone province).  Penny has won an extraordinary number of mystery writer awards, so a lort of people must agree with me.

Three Pines is a hidden gem of a village, with a gourmet bistro, a bookstore, several practicing artists, a national treasure of a poet, a great house with a grim history, and, unfortunately, a penchant for attracting murderers as well as refugees from the urban world.

Penny’s novels delve much deeper into the art of the mystery novel: Gamache is a French Canadian version of such thoughtful British sleuths as Inspector Dalgleish and Lord Peter Wimsey (note that they were all created by women, and none is a muscular, quick-on-the-draw Lothario).  His skill is not the ratiocinative brilliance of Holmes, but an ability to delve deep into human motivation; he always insists that the strangest crime makes complete sense if seen from the viewpoint of the killer, and that the roots of crime are often buried far in the past. 

Gamache is also a deeply kind man, giving second chances to junior officers who have failed and even betrayed him.  He serves as a center around whom circle a collection of complicated characters, especially in Three Pines, which is home, among others, to a gay couple who own the bistro and the B&B, a former psychologist now running the bookstore, and Ruth Zardo, a brilliant poet with a heart of – well something slightly soft – buried beneath geological layers of rage.  Penny also has two unusual characteristics for a series writer – she can allow her characters to change radically (or reveal totally unexpected layers), and, like David Simon in The Wire and Treme, has not hesitated to shock us with the loss of favorites from her cast.  Every new Penny therefore, is not only a whodunit, but a who will surprise us and how.  (The first in the series is Still Life; all are published by Minotaur.)

Wendell Berry’s Port William Kentucky, like Ohio’s Amish country, is an American enclave in which different mores and values survive the political and economic distortion that so plagues most of our world.   The key term in Berry’s vision is “membership.”  In his good society, people understand that they are connected by more than blood, marriage, proximity, or even friendship.  Rather they are connected by a common humanity that appears sometimes as secular, sometimes as spiritual.  As one of the town’s eldest members says, "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." 

Being members of each other means many things to Berry’s characters.  It means protecting a stranger who is hurt in a Saturday night brawl; it means helping a young couple purchase a farm where they had worked for years, but to which they have no legal claim; it means taking care of a drunken uncle who falls again and again, without ever hoping that he will change, and it means loving a woman from afar all her life, just because you believe she deserves to have someone love her.

It does not mean living in eternal peace and harmony.  In and around Port William there are not only town drunks; there are abusive husbands, greedy landowners, thieves, and even an occasional murder.  Because of course there are those who don’t know or won’t admit they are members of each other.   For the ones who do, however, there is a deep awareness that we are more than producers and consumers.  As an older character says to a younger, “we’re dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make, that can’t exist at all except as gifts.  Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift.  Everything about a man or woman that’s different from their price is a gift.  The life of a neighborhood is a gift…you’re friends and neighbors, you work together, and so there’s lots of giving and taking without a price – some that you don’t remember, some that you never knew about.  You don’t send a bill. You don’t, if you can help it, keep an account.  Once the account is kept and the bill presented, the friendship ends, the neighborhood is finished.”

That’s the kind of Shangri-la that just might exist, or be brought into existence for a time, like an evanescent subatomic particle.  I’d like to be there when it happened.  I’d like to help make it happen.

 

(Berry’s Port William appears and reappears in novels and short stories over the past half century, and tell about more than a century of the town’s life. His short stories are collected in That Distant Land; among his several novels my favorite is Jayber Crow.  Most are published by Counterpoint.)

           

           

           

The National Collegiate Almighty Association

“While the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems/It would be easier sometimes to change the past.”                                       --  Jackson Browne

What is the most powerful force on our planet, or maybe the cosmos?  Evidently it’s the NCAA.  Apparently they have two powers no other earthly body has: they can change the past and they can punish the dead.  Yes, the old Soviet Union and many other dictatorships have tried, airbrushing out the now-out-of-favor from photographs, altering historical records, and such.  Countries try to change the past: Turkey insists it never practiced genocide on the Armenians.  But there’s always someone, often the world’s majority, to call them on it.

In ancient times – what we used to call the Dark Ages -- some nations and religions would dig up corpses and drive stakes through their hearts, burn, or hang them for purported misdeeds.  You’d think we’d be beyond such primitive thinking. 

But the NCAA has borrowed from the playbooks of the Inquisition and the Stalinist era in its sanctions against Penn State.

True, sports authorities have sometimes changed the past, but with great inconsistency.  Sign a wrong scorecard in golf, and you either get the poorer score you signed, or forfeit if you signed a better score than you made. So your birdie is now a par, your par a bogie.  But that’s in the rulebook.  For decades, almost every sport refused to change a wrong call in the immediate past, except for umpires in tennis over-ruling line calls.  Now we have instant replay in one baseball event, and many football, basketball, and hockey situations.  But baseball refuses to correct an obviously wrong call, even when it costs a player a perfect game and does not alter the game’s outcome in any way.  And soccer absolutely will not sanction corrections, even though its referees have an impossible real-time job.

Sports also change the past when a violation has been discovered that falsifies the game’s outcome – ineligible players, drug enhancements, etc.  Of course they do this with total inconsistency too:  Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire still hold over a dozen home run records despite steroid use, while cyclists and Olympic athletes are stripped of their titles for the same infraction. 

In the so-called real world, very few democracies change the past because of later discoveries.  Imagine if they did: Colin Powell stripped of his rank because he later told the UN that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction on railroad cars.  Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s names removed from all airports and other public buildings if future documentation proves them complicit in Iran-Contra.  Let’s not even mention J. Edgar Hoover.

One fundamental principle in our civil and criminal society is that the dead cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds. When Ken Lay died in prison, his conviction was vacated, not because of any new evidence, but because his appeal had not run its course.  You can’t try a dead person, so you can’t convict him.  Innocent until proven guilty, especially in the afterlife.

Now we come to Penn State.  Because of allegations that involve one deceased coach and one former coach, a team loses thirteen years of games that it once won, perhaps the largest reality alteration in the history of sports. Who can doubt that the punishment is aimed primarily at the late Joe Paterno, condemned in the Freeh report post-mortem by the testimony of the indicted and disgraced living?  During the years of the forfeits, Penn State players won two Butkus awards (Lavar Arrington and Paul Poslusny).  If they made no  tackles in those years, do they forfeit the awards as well?  Does every Penn State player who was drafted in those years get undrafted because he did nothing during his college days?

            This is not to excuse anything done by Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State.  As Marc Antony said of Caesar, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath [he] answered for it.”  But to pursue a man beyond the grave serves no rational purpose: does the NCAA really think we need to deter future sports programs from similar behaviors?  Does it claim that if Penn State had turned in Sandusky in 2001, when the crime occurred in the athletic facility, its football program would have been devastated retroactively to 1999?  Do we benefit as a society by punishing the dead and by imagining that a declaration can alter history, even the small history that is college sports?  I think not.  The best thing about the NCAA decision is its fine of Penn State and designation of the money for abuse prevention.  Most of us hope we can change the future: only time travel movies try to do it by changing the past.

For the Birds

            No, I don’t spend all my time indoors reading and carping.  Sometimes I turn my curmudgeonry toward the natural world, especially out here on Martha’s Vineyard.  Last year, for example, I squirrel-proofed my bird feeders by stringing them (the feeders, not the squirrels) from thin wires between the house and a tree – six or more feet high. With no tightrope wide enough for their skills, the gray robbers are content to pick up what the birds drop, like the family dog lying under the chair of the sloppiest eater among the children.

            Victory – but short-lived.  After a week or so, the colorful array of finches, cardinals, bluejays, redwing blackbirds, chickadees and others were almost entirely driven off by a large and growing mob of grackles. 

Note to the pedantic: there is no term of venery for grackles as there is for owls (parliament), quail (bevy), starlings (murmuration), or, most hyperbolic, wrens (herd? Who thought that up?).  One blogger has suggested flash mob, which does capture their abruptness, but is much too pleasant.  I think they should be put in the lineup with their bigger cousins: a murder of crows and a mugging of grackles sounds about right to me.  Subnote: the British use “grackles” to refer to mobs of tourists – one of the best Britishisms since “bumph,” which means both toilet paper and any tedious pile of paper that requires your reluctant attention.

            But back to quiscalus quiscula. (The dictionary makers list this odd name as “of uncertain origin,” and suggest a possibility that it comes from the Spanish quisquilla, worthless fellow.  Sounds apt to me – maybe it all goes back to the Latin “who” as in “Who the hell are these birds anyway?”)  I called my good birding friend Peter Tacy in Connecticut, who advised me on these Mafiosi -- the black and purple combo suggests a similar fashion sense, doesn’t it?  Peter explained that grackles shift from insects to seeds after mating, that they do indeed take over feeders, and that they can not only chase off smaller birds, but also add them to their diets.  His suggested cure was to put out unattractive food, such as nyger thistle seeds, which worked well, except that almost no one else liked the seeds either and they got wet and clogged up the feeder.

            Fast forward to this June, when I opened up my wallet for a specifically designed nyger feeder (the little birds seem much happier with this one, especially a mated pair of finches who often dine together), and a large-bird-proof feeder that shuts down when anyone heavier than a cardinal tries to eat by perching on its ring.

            At last we have a winner, and a source of great entertainment.  The jays stop by occasionally, but give up almost instantly.  Everyone else dines successfully.  But best of all is watching a grackle spend several minutes trying to beat the system. 

            First he lands and tries a feeder hole, but it’s closed.  He studies it, then moves to the next hole. (There are six.) Still no joy.  He glances up again at the tube, where he sees plenty of seed.  So he looks into a hole, which of course is not a hole as long as he is perched.  Around the perching ring again a few times.  Now he stretches high up to stare right into the cylinder.  Looks like seed from here too, he must think.  Around the ring again, checking holes, up to look at the seed.  Then (for he doesn’t worry about predators as do almost all the other birds), he looks around for the culprit.  Am I being punked?  Where’s Ashton Kutcher?  Around again, check the holes, check the tube.  Then straight up as if imploring the Great Grackle in the Sky for help.  For a good five minutes I watch him, as smaller birds perch on the wire, balancing caution and hope.  Finally he gives up.  I turn my head to watch him fly, and when I snap back to the feeder, the house finches are already dining. 

            Ah, sweet triumph!  Anyone know a parallel strategy for the mob feeders at Morgan Stanley, Barclays, etc., etc.?           

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.