I'm a writer and independent scholar with a special focus on religion, horror, the paranormal, creativity, consciousness, and culture. My books include Dark Awakenings, Divinations of the Deep, and A Course in Demonic Creativity. I also talk a lot about cultural apocalypse, economic Armageddon, peak oil and energy, the madness of the corporate-controlled media, the sickness of our collective domination by a technopolistic social order, and the unfolding of dystopian futures right here in the present. Here at The Teeming Brain I explore the convergence of these matters by writing original articles and curating compelling content from around the media webs. Also see my blog Demon Muse, which is devoted to exploring the theory and practice of artistic creativity as an engagement with a felt "other" in the form of a muse, a daemon, or the unconscious mind (or all three at once).
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The cover feature for the current issue of Boston Review, titled “How Markets Crowd Out Morals,” takes the form of a hugely stimulating forum on the thesis put forth by Harvard government professor Michael Sandel in his new book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (which I’ve referenced here previously). Sandel argues that America’s market-based master meme, which says absolutely every aspect of life can and should be commodified and conducted according to monetary ideas of gain and loss, has gotten out of control and begun to corrupt personal life and civil society by invading realms totally unamenable to them. In the forum, which is available in its entirety online, Sandel leads with an essay derived from his book, and this is followed by nine responses plus his collective reply to them.
One of the responses in particular caught my attention. It’s from Lew Daly, Senior Fellow and Director of the Sustainable Progress Initiative at Demos and author of God’s Economy and God and the Welfare State. The title is “Free Market Idolatry,” and for my money (pun definitely intended) it absolutely nails the spiritual and philosophical heart of what’s happened to us all in this age of — to invoke Morris Berman’s rhetoric — hype and hustling triumphant:
Sandel sees a world in which markets increasingly “corrupt, dissolve, or displace nonmarket norms,” that is, the expectations, customs, and interdictions that shape a common moral life and provide a moral structure for the common good. But his spatial metaphor of “crowding out” obscures the true depths of market corruption. When Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein can even try to defend what he does as “God’s work,” the problem is not a crowding out of morals but their transvaluation: making money, formerly an exclusive realm of cosmic evil (or at least a cause of crippling moral diseases among the affluent), is now “doing God’s work.”
…Sandel’s important project on the moral limits of markets arrives at a moment that profoundly illustrates just how marginal such a critique has become. When Wall Street collapsed, the moral validity of market forces somehow emerged newly strengthened. This would be impossible in a time when non-market values had a part in the structure of power. Instead, we can see how religious imagination has filled the absence of non-market power, with non-market values commonly expressed in religious, sometimes apocalyptic, terms.
This morning when I went to scan the day’s delivery of essays, news, and information, one of the first things that came to my attention was this:
Nothing I’ve heard from politicians or economists on the world crisis has shivered my spine like an hour spent with the gentle‑mannered historian Antony Beevor, whose mighty new book on the Second World War is making him the pundit of the moment. He does not mean to be alarmist, and that is why the soft warnings in his sunlit garden are chilling. Of course the rise of the Right in Europe is not the same as the rise of the Right in the Thirties, he soothes. But isn’t it terrifying the way the Greeks are portraying the Germans as Nazis in their popular press, with Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform? There are “far too many jibes” about a Fourth Reich. The weedlike eruption of extremist parties makes him “uneasy” – and if Beevor is uneasy, it probably means the rest of us should be scared witless. “The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism,” he says. “We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.”
In Europe, what started out four years ago as a sovereign debt crisis, morphed into a euro currency crisis and led to the fall of several European governments, has now triggered a full-blown crisis of public confidence: in the economy, in the future, in the benefits of European economic integration, in membership in the European Union, in the euro and in the free market system. The public is very worried about joblessness, inflation and public debt, and those fears are fueling much of this uncertainty and negativity.
Both of those in turn came on the heels of this, which I read about 12 hours earlier:
In every economic crisis there comes a moment of clarity. In Europe soon, millions of people will wake up to realize that the euro-as-we-know-it is gone. Economic chaos awaits them…Europe’s crisis to date is a series of supposedly “decisive” turning points that each turned out to be just another step down a steep hill…Some European politicians are now telling us that an orderly exit for Greece is feasible under current conditions, and Greece will be the only nation that leaves. They are wrong. Greece’s exit is simply another step in a chain of events that leads towards a chaotic dissolution of the euro zone. During the next stage of the crisis, Europe’s electorate will be rudely awakened to the large financial risks which have been foisted upon them in failed attempts to keep the single currency alive…A disorderly break-up of the euro area will be far more damaging to global financial markets than the crisis of 2008. In fall 2008 the decision was whether or how governments should provide a back-stop to big banks and the creditors to those banks. Now some European governments face insolvency themselves…[T]here will be large scale capital flight out of Europe into the United States and Asia. Who can be confident that our global megabanks are truly ready to withstand the likely losses? It is almost certain that large numbers of pensioners and households will find their savings are wiped out directly or inflation erodes what they saved all their lives. The potential for political turmoil and human hardship is staggering…No one knows for sure how long they can delay the complete collapse of the euro, perhaps months or even several more years, but we are moving steadily to an ugly end…Forget about a rescue in the form of the G20, the G8, the G7, a new European Union Treasury, the issue of Eurobonds, a large scale debt mutualization scheme, or any other bedtime story. We are each on our own.
One of the last items I came across in this morning’s scan was this:
On the eve of his return to Africa earlier this week, [renowned paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Richard] Leakey spoke to The Associated Press in New York City about the past and the future. “If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you’ve got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena,” Leakey says. “Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one”…Leakey, who clearly cherishes investigating the past, is less optimistic about the future. “We may be on the cusp of some very real disasters that have nothing to do with whether the elephant survives, or a cheetah survives, but if we survive.”
And for a kind of whipped-topping finish, these all came on the heels of this very able and absorbing collective review of and response to Morris Berman‘s three-volume trilogy on American decline, which I read three days ago, and which distills Morris’ basic message and insights in quite effective fashion:
Idiot deans, rancid rappers, endlessly chattering sports commentators, an avalanche of half-inch-deep self-help manuals; a plague of gadgets, a deluge of stimuli, an epidemic of rudeness, a desert of mutual indifference: the upshot is our daily immersion in a suffocating stream of kitsch, blather, stress, and sentimental banality. [Morris] Berman colorfully and convincingly renders the relentless coarsening and dumbing down of everyday life in late (dare we hope?) American capitalism [in his three-volume exploration of American decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011)]…In Spenglerian fashion, Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is…hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. Expansion, accumulation, economic growth: this is the ground bass of American history, like the hum of a dynamo in the basement beneath the polite twitterings on the upper stories about “liberty” and “a light unto the nations.”
…As a former medievalist, Berman finds contemporary parallels to the fall of Rome compelling. By the end of the empire, he points out, economic inequality was drastic and increasing, the legitimacy and efficacy of the state was waning, popular culture was debased, civic virtue among elites was practically nonexistent, and imperial military commitments were hopelessly unsustainable. As these volumes abundantly illustrate, this is 21st century America in a nutshell…The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion. An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries.
– George Scialabba, “How Bad Is It?“ The New Inquiry, May 16, 2012
So, are you scared yet? Or gripped by a gut-level case of deepening despair? Or perhaps both? Then consider Scialabba’s final words in the Berman-oriented essay above. They resonate with me, at least, and express my own emotions quite well, even as the reasonableness of anxiety and despair still appears very real:
There is something immensely refreshing, even cathartic, about Berman’s refusal to hold out any hope of avoiding our civilization’s demise. And our reaction goes some way toward proving his point: We are so sick of hucksters, of authors trying — like everyone else on all sides at all times in this pervasively hustling culture — to sell us something, that it is a relief to encounter someone who isn’t, who has no designs on our money or votes or hopes, who simply has looked into the depths, into our catastrophic future, and is compelled to describe it, as Cassandra was.
Yes, I think that nails it: there’s “something immensely refreshing, even cathartic” in recognizing reality for what it is, especially when that reality is a nominally unpleasant one that normal human cultural and psychological tendencies would lead us to deny and repress. And even though Scialabba is surely correct when, in comparing Berman to Cassandra, he adds, “No doubt his efforts will meet with equal success,” that doesn’t change the point. Because, after all, what is “success”? Working one’s personal will and actualizing one’s partisan preferences by heading off reality itself, which in this case takes the form of a necessary collapse? Or learning to recognize and embrace reality at large for what it truly is?
Eckhart Tolle does as good a job as anybody I know of articulating the philosophical issues, and more, the real, pressing, pointed, existential-spiritual issues, that are at stake and at play here:
The ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet Communism. How deeply entrenched, how solid and monolithic it appeared, and yet within a few years, it disintegrated from within. No one foresaw this. All were taken by surprise. There are many more such surprises in store for us…A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension in consciousness…When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world to I create? To find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight. If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.
– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth (2005)
Yes, that’s the point, the purpose, and the power, all at once: changing the structures of the human mind by embracing reality with clear sight, an open mind, and an open heart, so that our currently dysfunctional world system won’t simply recreate itself spontaneously after its chaotic implosion. As Jesus tells Judas in Martin Scorsese’s wonderful cinematic adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ, in a scene where he and Judas debate the nature of freedom and Judas insists on the necessity of “freeing the body” from the corrupt Roman government before going on to focus on more spiritual matters, “The foundation is the soul…If you don’t replace the spirit first and change what’s inside, then you’re only going to replace the Romans with someone else and nothing ever changes. Even if you’re victorious you’ll still be filled with the poison. You’ve got to break the chain of evil.” Presently, one concrete application of this wisdom is to accept that the civilization we’ve built really is rotting from within and flinging itself apart.
ADDENDUM:
Immediately after first publishing this post, I was hit by another item of the same general tenor as the ones quoted above, but focusing on a different facet of the current dystopian situation, and written by none other than Slavoj Žižek:
Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement — which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police — have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012. The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies…But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s predicament…The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable…Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy.
This week’s recommended articles, essays, and blog posts cover: various possible modes of doom that await us (or that are facing us right now), including climate change, economic collapse, and some other usual suspects; the hijacking of global culture by money and its possibly psychopathic servants; the historical role of alchemy in giving birth to our modern-day economic system driven by credit-based currency; a philosophy professor who has taken it on himself to publicize the anti-technological cultural critique of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, since in many ways these critiques may be pointedly on-target; an essay from no less authoritative a source than MIT Tech Review explaining why Facebook is not the new Google but the new AOL, and why it may collapse and bring down much of the rest of the Web with it; a 2008 report from The Wall Street Journal about one rather shocking way (in my opinion, at least) that American megachurches have begun to exploit corporate marketing tactics; and excellent essays (plus a video) about the life, thought, and work of Philip K. Dick, Whitley Strieber, and Ray Bradbury.
Teaser: Prophecies of impending doom — based on hard science as well as Scripture — abound. Where does our appetite for retribution come from?
Why all the doom? Why the persistent predictions of volcanic eruptions, mega-earthquakes, tidal waves, new ice ages, the obliteration of life as we know it, and even the annihilation of the earth itself?… The ever-expanding cadre of bestselling science, strategic, political, and business writers who make a living prophesying the less-than-happy human future would not ally themselves with literal readings of Isaiah or the Revelation of St. John, much less with eccentrics like Harold Camping, but the stories they propose seem remarkably similar. Although they appear secular, they are Biblical tales of the pillaging of the earth by human greed and vice and the inevitable reckoning…The last time there was this much anxiety about the end of the world was after the Second World War and the advent of the atomic age…Our problems [now] are vaguer and more systematic, not so much a matter of policy as of how we live, and seem to come from every direction at once…While we may be unable to reliably prophesy the future and the prospect of ruined cities, anarchy, and mass death still seems a remote, nightmarish vision (fodder for Hollywood producers and unhinged radio hosts), most of us sense that the huge, overcomplicated world we have created is unsustainable in the long run, and the practical solutions commonly proposed — smaller, self-contained communities; eco-friendly architecture; smart cars; banking regulations — pale before the encroaching tsunami of problems. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting.
[NOTE: This piece from NASA's perennial climate change doomsayer strikes me with particularly personal relevance, since I lived through last year's apocalyptic Texas drought, which he holds up as an illustration of where things are headed. And let me tell you, it truly was hair-raising down here.]
Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate…Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically…The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.
Teaser: Wall Street bankers could have averted the global financial crisis, so why didn’t they? In this exclusive extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that they should be prosecuted.
It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident. This behaviour is criminal. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and in concealment of criminal assets; and committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression. And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way…The Obama government has rationalised its failure to prosecute anyone (literally, anyone at all) for bubble-related crimes by saying that while much of Wall Street’s behaviour was unwise or unethical, it wasn’t illegal. With apologies for my vulgarity, this is complete horseshit. When the government is really serious about something – preventing another 9/11, or pursuing major organised crime figures –- it has many tools at its disposal and often uses them…When did Wall Street insiders know there was a really serious sub-prime mortgage bubble, and that they could game it? Many of the clever ones knew by about 2004…[M]any on Wall Street realised there was a huge bubble by late 2006, because that’s when they started massively betting on its collapse…Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed bonds sold from 2005 until 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. And as the bubble peaked and started to collapse, executives repeatedly lied about their companies’ financial condition. In some cases, they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which executives were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew their firms were about to collapse.
[NOTE: The author of this piece is a Nobel laureate and a Harvard professor of economics and philosophy. In case, you know, this might add just a little bit of weight to her (vastly significant) analysis and opinion here.]
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Europe’s current malaise is the replacement of democratic commitments by financial dictates — from leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank, and indirectly from credit-rating agencies, whose judgments have been notoriously unsound. Participatory public discussion — the “government by discussion” expounded by democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot — could have identified appropriate reforms over a reasonable span of time, without threatening the foundations of Europe’s system of social justice. In contrast, drastic cuts in public services with very little general discussion of their necessity, efficacy or balance have been revolting to a large section of the European population and have played into the hands of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents. Second, both democracy and the chance of creating good policy are undermined when ineffective and blatantly unjust policies are dictated by leaders. The obvious failure of the austerity mandates imposed so far has undermined not only public participation — a value in itself — but also the possibility of arriving at a sensible, and sensibly timed, solution. This is a surely a far cry from the “united democratic Europe” that the pioneers of European unity sought.
There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A 2010 study found that 4 percent of a sample of corporate managers met a clinical threshold for being labeled psychopaths, compared with 1 percent for the population at large. (However, the sample was not representative, as the study’s authors have noted.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law. The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news…[J]ust open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught…There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.
[NOTE: Read and consider this one carefully. The direct link it identifies between alchemy, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the Baconian project of improving humankind through the application of science, and the transformation of society and culture through the creation of a credit money system is deeply illuminating.]
Spinoza was just one of many seventeenth century intellectual luminaries who seriously engaged with alchemical thought and practice: others included John Locke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. In England, confidence in the utility of alchemy was widespread. It was therefore unsurprising that metallic transmutation was pursued as a solution to the stubborn scarcity of money problem that had severely curtailed England’s commerce for decades…Despite many reports of successful transmutations, efforts to find the lever that would give mankind control over the money stock failed to materialize. At this point, the same social reformers who had pursued alchemical transmutations switched their attention to the promotion of a generally circulating credit currency, authoring some of the first proposals for such a currency…I suggest that the new political economy that laid the foundation for the Financial Revolution was greatly influenced by the Scientific Revolution, which included alchemical, as well as, Baconian and probabilistic thinking…The Hartlibians were fully committed to the Baconian project of using knowledge to gain control over nature for utilitarian purposes… By shifting to a worldview in which the only constant was continuous change, growth and improvement, the role and responsibility of money consequently changed. The main challenge now was to find a way to expand the money stock so that it could keep pace with the ever growing world of goods. For this to be possible, a much more flexible monetary system had to be developed. The Hartlibians’ first attempt at establishing a method to expand the money stock was to employ their alchemical knowledge in the transmutation of lead into gold…The failure of alchemical transmutation to provide mankind with a lever to control the money stock encouraged members of the Hartlib Circle to focus on another expedient promising to generate the same set of benefits as alchemy. They turned their attention towards finding a way to establishing a widely circulating credit currency, either by creating a bank or by reconfiguring the existing network of private credit instruments so that they would circulate more widely. In addition to offering solutions to the same problems, metallic transmutation and credit money shared the same underlying idea of using an expansion in the money stock to facilitate the infinite improvement process. As such, the idea of making money through metallic transmutation or credit were both rooted in the same alchemical and Baconian worldview and were part of the same universal reform project.
Media profiles from the time of his capture, several months after the manifesto’s publication, paint Kaczynski as a kind of comic-book villain, a scruffy loner in a hooded sweatshirt whose failure in relationships drove him to insane acts of violence. But when David F. Skrbina, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan here, read the manifesto in The Washington Post on the day it was published, he saw value in the message. He was particularly impressed by its clarity of argument and its references to major scholars on the philosophy of technology. He saw a thinker who wrongly turned to violence but had an argument worthy of further consideration. That argument certainly wasn’t perfect in Skrbina’s view, and he had some questions. Why not just reform the current system rather than knock it down? What was Kaczynski’s vision of how people should live? In November 2003, Skrbina mailed a letter to Kaczynski, then as now in a supermax prison in Colorado, asking those and other questions designed “to challenge him on his views, to press him.” So began a correspondence that has spanned more than 150 letters and has led Skrbina to help compile a book of Kaczynski’s writings, called Technological Slavery, released in 2010. The book is a kind of complete works of this violent tech skeptic, including the original manifesto, letters to Skrbina answering the professor’s questions, and other essays written from the Unabomber’s prison cell. Today, Skrbina is something like a friend to Kaczynski. And he’s more than that. The philosophy lecturer from Dearborn serves as the Unabomber’s intellectual sparring partner, a distributor of his writings to a private e-mail list of contacts, and at times even an advocate for his anti-tech message.
Teaser: For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.
Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy…I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value…Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits…Facebook has the scale, the platform, and the brand to be the new Google. It only lacks the big idea. Right now, it doesn’t actually know how to embed its usefulness into world commerce (or even, really, what its usefulness is)…But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook…The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn’t Google; it’s Yahoo or AOL…You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook — that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site — will fall with everybody else.
Teaser: To try to keep their flocks, churches are turning to undercover inspectors, who note water stains, dull sermons and poor hospitality.
[A] new breed of church consultants [is] aiming to equip pastors with modern marketing practices. Pastors say mystery worshippers…offer insight into how newcomers judge churches — a critical measure at a time when mainline denominations continue to shed members and nearly half of American adults switch religious affiliations. In an increasingly diverse and fluid religious landscape, churches competing for souls are turning to corporate marketing strategies such as focus groups, customer-satisfaction surveys and product giveaways. At least half a dozen consulting companies have introduced secret-church-shopper services in recent years…So far, secret-shopper services mainly target Christian churches, where declining “brand loyalty” among worshippers has become a common motif…Church leaders say they’re seeking new ways to assess their services and evaluate everything from the style of music to how comfortable the pews are as they court fickle churchgoers…Some theologians warn that mystery-worshipper services will drive “spiritual consumerism”…Others say that church shopping has become necessary for churches seeking to compete in an increasingly mobile and consumer-oriented society. “My competition is Cracker Barrel restaurant down the street,” says Pete Wilson, pastor of CrossPoint Church in Nashville, Tenn., who regularly enlists a secret shopper to evaluate his 2,000-person congregation.
* * *
Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher
Simon Critchley, Opinionator, The New York Times, May 2012
[NOTE: This three-part series of essays on Dick's esoteric/quasi-gnostic philosophy and body of work -- written by a philosophy professor -- is utterly captivating, although Critchley's general dismissiveness toward the possible accuracy and reality of Dick's vision in the third part is, I think, unwarranted.]
Was Dick seriously bonkers? Was he psychotic? Was he schizophrenic? (He writes, “The schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed.”) Were the visions simply the effect of a series of brain seizures that some call T.L.E. — temporal lobe epilepsy? Could we now explain and explain away Dick’s revelatory experience by some better neuroscientific story about the brain? Perhaps. But the problem is that each of these causal explanations misses the richness of the phenomena that Dick was trying to describe and also overlooks his unique means for describing them. The fact is that after Dick experienced the events of what he came to call “2-3-74” (the events of February and March of that year), he devoted the rest of his life to trying to understand what had happened to him. For Dick, understanding meant writing. Suffering from what we might call “chronic hypergraphia,” between 2-3-74 and his death, Dick wrote more than 8,000 pages about his experience. He often wrote all night, producing 20 single-spaced, narrow-margined pages at a go, largely handwritten and littered with extraordinary diagrams and cryptic sketches…In a later remark in “Exegesis,” Dick writes, “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He interestingly goes on to add, “The core of my writing is not art but truth.” We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction. Dick saw his fiction writing as the creative attempt to describe what he discerned as the true reality. He adds, “I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”
Anyone who knows anything about the subject of UFOs and alien abduction would have heard of Louis Whitley Strieber, the successful horror novelist, who, in 1987, published a book called Communion which still stands as one of the most terrifying, factual and powerful accounts of alien abduction ever written. But far from being just an abductee and author, Strieber is also something of an undeclared mystic and prophet. It seems he has much to say about humanity’s spiritual, political and environmental future. Is he, as some have claimed, nothing but a prophet of doom, or do his words contain genuine wisdom and an important message?…Strieber was already a successful author before he decided to risk his reputation by publishing Communion. His previous books, of which there are many, deal with issues like nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Along with childhood friend James Kunetka, Strieber wrote the 1984 New York Times bestselling novel Warday, which concerns the subject of nuclear holocaust. He also wrote a number of highly acclaimed horror novels, such as The Hunger and The Wolfen, both of which were adapted into films. When Communion was first published, it quickly shot to number 1 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. It then went on to become an international bestseller. Although Strieber allegedly received six figures from publishing company William Morrow (now an imprint of HarperCollins), it seems unlikely that Communion was a hoax, and that he wrote it for the money – which is what some critics have claimed. In a 1987 interview for the San Francisco Examiner, Strieber said: “I didn’t need to write it. I could have written another novel… Why would I hold myself up to the ridicule that a book like Communion brings? I felt that I had to write this book.”
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This short 2008 film from the National Endowment for the arts features Ray Bradbury as he discusses his life, literary loves and Fahrenheit 451.
Selected excerpts (transcriptions courtesy of the inimitable Maria Popova):
“Books are smart and brilliant and wise. Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.”
“Alone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home!’ And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I’ve written every day in the last 75 years. I’ve never stopped writing.”
“If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.”
Have you or anybody you care about ever suffered from depression? How about bipolar disorder? Autism? Schizophrenia? Attention-deficit disorder? Obviously, given the prevalence of these mental and neurological illnesses, the answer is almost certainly affirmative.
Or then again, maybe not. Here’s the dirty little trick that’s been pulled over on all of us: each of those illnesses is a wholesale semantic/cultural invention, concocted out of thin air, that deserves to be put in scare quotes. And this, of course, imparts a whole new tone to them. Think about it: there’s an entirely different feeling when you say somebody suffers from “depression” or “ADD.” For full effect, imagine translating the scare quotes into the now-trendy “air quotes.” In fact, why not try it out. Say the words out loud and make the quotation marks with your fingers: “depression,” “autism,” “bipolar disorder,” “attention-deficit disorder,” “schizophrenia.” Feel the irony now coating these familiar psychiatric terms. Note how they no longer seem so familiar or meaningful, how they no longer seem to signify something literally real.
If you’ve successfully achieved this disorienting act of linguistic dislocation and decontextualizing, then you’ve begun to deprogram yourself and wake up from the spell of cultural hypnosis that’s been cast over us all by the American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma. And that’s not just me talking; it’s actual members of the APA, including, most significantly, the lead editor of the DSM-IV, the fourth edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (see the linked and excerpted articles below).
The DSM is, in the words of one of the items below, “as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians.” This is because it’s the official manual that lays out the APA’s official definitions of mental illnesses and the criteria for diagnosing them. I was first introduced to it personally when I worked as a producer of video courses for Missouri State University in the 1990s. The job entailed attending and videotaping every classroom meeting of various live, lecture-based college courses, and then spending months transforming them into video versions of themselves with the help of computer graphics, music beds, and creative editing. This meant I got to know these classes better than any of the enrolled students, and one of them was a social work class about substance abuse intervention that involved regular references to the DSM-IV. Spending six or eight months making that course burned into my mind the implicit understanding that this book is truly the Holy Scripture of mental illness, because the instructor referred to it at least one or two times in every lecture.
But the thing is — and I didn’t wake up to this until some years later — psychiatry as a formal profession really has no idea what constitutes mental illness, nor does it know what constitutes mental health, for the simple reason that it doesn’t know what the soul — the “psyche” in psychiatry and psychology — really is, does, means, or ought to be. And this is the dirty little not-so-secret that lies not just at the heart of psychiatry but at the heart of every one of the so-called human sciences. How is it that we ever came to think “science” in its modern-day iteration as “the study of empirically testable and verifiable phenomena” is applicable to the realms of human society and personal reality anyway? Where exactly does psychiatry, formally defined as a medical field and thus a “hard” science, diverge from the “soft” science of psychology or any other “social science”? If there’s a controversy going on in the area of consciousness studies right now (as indeed there is) about whether consciousness really boils down to the brain or is something else, something wider, then how did the biomedical model of psychiatry ever become the supreme reigning orthodoxy in modern technological society? The answer is simple: it became so by sheer assertion, by default assumption, and by the imposition of the anti-metaphysical claim of biomedical materialism (which is of course a metaphysical position in itself) onto the study of the human self. In other words, and to widen the frame a bit, it happened as part of the ongoing takeover (hijacking) of “mainstream thought” by fundamentalist materialism wedded to economic materialism that has characterized modern society ever since the epochal transformations of the scientific revolution and Age of Enlightenment.
In the 1960s and 70s, Alan Watts, one of my most beloved authors and primary philosophical influences, wrote and lectured regularly about the fact — the fact, mind you, not the ideologically motivated assertion — that the psychiatric and psychological professions as formally practiced literally have no idea what they’re doing. (And of course he wasn’t alone in this, as the example of R.D. Laing, to name just one notable spokesperson for the anti-psychiatry movement, shows.) Watts once wrote,
The publication of my Psychotherapy East and West and Joyous Cosmology early in the sixties brought me into public and private discussion with many leading members of the psychiatric profession, and I was astonished at what seemed to be their actual terror of unusual states of consciousness. I had thought that psychiatrists should have been as familiar with these wildernesses and unexplored territories of the mind as Indian guides, but as I perused something like the two huge volumes of The American Handbook of Psychiatry, I found only maps of the soul as primitive as ancient maps of the world. There were vaguely outlined emptinesses called Schizophrenia, Hysteria, and Catatonia, accompanied with little more solid information than “Here be dragons and cameleopards.”
– Alan Watts, “The Soul-Searchers,” excerpted from his In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915-1965 (1972)
This isn’t just a problem from the past. The “emperor has no clothes” situation that Watts identified in the psychiatric profession half a century ago is still with us today, only more so, because today we are, if possible, even more overtaken and programmed and hypnotized by the false idea that psychiatry and psychology actually proceed on a basis of assured and verified knowledge. And this means we live even more fully under the sway of falsely conceived ideas about our very souls and subjectivities that are forced upon us from without like mental-spiritual straitjackets. Hence the almost universal, casual, workaday acceptance of the ideas of “depression” and all the rest. All of them, to repeat, are invented concepts, not discovered realities. Entrenched and sometimes debilitating sadness and lethargy, and the draining of happiness or even the ability to experience it — what used to be called “melancholia” — is a reality. But the label “major depression” and all that goes with it is a made-up concept that falsely implies psychiatrists really know what they’re dealing with. A high amount of jumpiness and nervous energy accompanied by a rapidly shifting focus of attention are experienced by a lot of people, but to call them “ADD” or “ADHD” is a sleight-of-hand maneuver that falsely reifies them and binds them together into a supposed illness. Hearing voices and experiencing a kind of volcanic uprush of sensory and mental-emotional activity from an apparently internal source in the psyche that feels separate and autonomous from one’s conscious self is as old as the human race itself, but to medicalize the experience by labeling it “schizophrenia” and then proceed on the idea that it requires drug-based treatment (which does, yes, prove helpful to some people) is to flat-out lie by saying the condition’s basic nature is scientifically understood even if its exact causes aren’t. (Who can confidently claim — as in truly, authoritatively, reasonably — that the psychiatric profession’s medicalized clampdown on this perennial human experience is any more valid than, say, Philip K. Dick’s assertion that “The schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed”?)
For people who have never begun the journey down this path of mental deprogramming, it can be very difficult to get a handle on it and really feel the true depth of its earth-shattering implications, which center around the fact that the very view of human life — yours, mine, everybody’s, up-close and personal — and the nature of reality that we collectively share in our post-industrial techno-dystopia is shot through with arbitrary scientistic bullshit. The “official” (note the scare quotes) line about who and what we are, and who and what life is, is a scam, a snow job, a line we’ve been fed along with a spoonful of sugar about its supposedly solid status to help the medicine go down. There is no more intimate and comprehensive locus from which to arbitrate these kinds of all-encompassing, axiom-level notions than the psyche itself, the center-point of our individual perspectives. Blast the reigning assumptions and dogmas there, and the entire world radiating outward from them begins to crack apart.
As a starting point, I advise reading the following extended excerpts from various recent writings about the psychiatric profession’s internal war over the imminent new revision — the first in nearly 20 years — of the DSM. I’ve also included a couple of excellent pieces from The New York Review of Books about the deep history of how we arrived at the current biomedical model of mental illness, and why this development was very conscious, very illogical, and very driven, in part, by an unholy alliance between the psychiatric profession and what, with their help, became today’s Big Pharma.
James Howard Kunstler recently published a couple of blog posts (“Juked by Medicine” and “Matrix of Rackets“) about an unpleasant and thoroughly disillusioning experience he had with his doctor. In one of them he said, “I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives.” The answer, of course, is yes, and this is something I assert based not only on hearsay but on recent and ongoing experiences that my family and friends have had with doctors and medical institutions. And the same point extends, clearly and incontrovertibly, to the psychiatric and psychological professions as well. All bets, as they say, are now off.
One might liken the latest draft of psychiatry’s new diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, to a bowl of spaghetti. Hanging over the side are the marginal diagnoses of psychiatry, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, important for certain subpopulations but not central to the discipline. At the center of the spaghetti bowl are the diagnoses at the heart of psychiatry: major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder… The main difficulty is that the principal diagnoses of psychiatry are artifacts…[Major depression was created by] lumping…two forms of depressive illness together. In fact, they are so disparate that the depression term itself should be abandoned. It is now shopworn with use and has approximately the same scientific value as other discarded psychiatric diagnoses such as hysteria and madness…There is no natural disease entity called schizophrenia: it has no typical, or pathognomonic, symptom, no predictable response to treatment, no reliable prognosis. Chronic psychosis is really a common final pathway for several disparate forms of psychotic illness that should not be lumped together…[L]umping] all [forms of chronic psychosis] together commits the same error as lumping together melancholia and nonmelancholia…The third fatal flaw at the center of the bowl of spaghetti is bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that assumes that the depression of unipolar disorder (otherwise known as major depression) is different from bipolar depression. But they’re really the same…And the entire concept of bipolar disorder has been a gift to the pharmaceutical industry, which has been able to re-position anticonvulsant drugs to counter the terrible bipolar menace.
“We made mistakes that had terrible consequences [in the DSM-IV]” [says Allen Frances, the edition's lead editor]. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics — and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs…The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it….At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians…What the battle over DSM-5 should make clear to all of us — professional and layman alike — is that psychiatric diagnosis will probably always be laden with uncertainty, that the labels doctors give us for our suffering will forever be at least as much the product of negotiations around a conference table as investigations at a lab bench.
The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain…What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing?…On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one?…In the space of three short years…drugs had become available to treat what at that time were regarded as the three major categories of mental illness — psychosis, anxiety, and depression — and the face of psychiatry was totally transformed…[I]nstead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug. That was a great leap in logic…“By this same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain conditions is a deficiency of opiates, since narcotic pain medications activate opiate receptors in the brain.” Or similarly, one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin…[B]ecause the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants…[E]ven as drug treatment for mental illness has skyrocketed, so has the prevalence of the conditions treated…”Could our drug-based paradigm of care, in some unforeseen way, be fueling this modern-day plague?”…[T]he natural history of mental illness has changed. Whereas conditions such as schizophrenia and depression were once mainly self-limited or episodic, with each episode usually lasting no more than six months and interspersed with long periods of normalcy, the conditions are now chronic and lifelong. Whitaker believes that this might be because drugs, even those that relieve symptoms in the short term, cause long-term mental harms that continue after the underlying illness would have naturally resolved.
[T]he medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported,” and he launched an all-out media and public relations campaign to do exactly that. Psychiatry had a powerful weapon that its competitors lacked. Since psychiatrists must qualify as MDs, they have the legal authority to write prescriptions. By fully embracing the biological model of mental illness and the use of psychoactive drugs to treat it, psychiatry was able to relegate other mental health care providers to ancillary positions and also to identify itself as a scientific discipline along with the rest of the medical profession. Most important, by emphasizing drug treatment, psychiatry became the darling of the pharmaceutical industry, which soon made its gratitude tangible…Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission, because in all medical publications, whether journal articles or textbooks, statements of fact are supposed to be supported by citations of published scientific studies…”A powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority”…[The psychiatric profession is currently beset by a] “frenzy” of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest.
“Label jars, not people” and “stop medicalising the normal symptoms of life” read placards, as hundreds of protesters — including former patients, academics and doctors — gathered to lobby the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) annual meeting. The demonstration aimed to highlight the harm the protesters believe psychiatry is perpetrating in the name of healing. One concern is that while psychiatric medications are more widely prescribed than almost any drugs in history, they often don’t work well and have debilitating side effects. Psychiatry also professes to respect human rights, while regularly treating people against their will. Finally, psychiatry keeps expanding its list of disorders without solid scientific justification. At the heart of the issue is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — psychiatry’s diagnostic “bible.” Allen Frances, who headed the last major rewrite of the manual — DSM-IV — fears that the revised version will undermine the profession’s credibility. “What concerns me most,” he says, “is that its publication will dramatically expand the realm of psychiatry and narrow the realm of normality.”
NPR reported it this morning, and I listened with rapt attention during my commute to work:
It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a full grade…The Sunlight Foundation took the entire Congressional Record dating back to the 1990s and plugged it into a searchable database. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Sunlight, took all those speeches and ran them through an algorithm to determine the grade level of congressional discourse. “We just kind of did it for fun, and I was kind of shocked when I plotted that data and I saw that, oh my God, there’s been a real drop-off in the last several years,” he says. In 2005, Congress spoke at an 11.5 grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. Now, it’s 10.6. In other words, Congress dropped from talking like juniors to talking like sophomores. Flesch-Kinkaid equates higher grade levels with longer sentences and words with more syllables.
This is of course right in line with the general trend of America’s linguistic devolution and infantilization that has been underway for several decades now. A few years ago I published a post here about its specifically literary manifestation. If you’ll pardon me the indulgence of quoting myself (since there’s crossover interest with today’s NPR story):
[T]he whole thing [is] attributable to a generalized move from a culture where print and concepts are more central to one where images are more central…For confirmation one can just compare most of today’s mainstream, best-selling books with the popular best-sellers of an earlier era and note the differences. Dickens is of course the arch-example from 19th century England. He was wildly popular with the everyday crowd, and yet his prose is demonstrably more complex — I’m talking quantifiably, in terms of the various “reading level” measurements that teachers commonly apply to texts to find out whether they’re suitable for students of certain ages and capabilities — than the overwhelming majority of current best-selling books, both fiction and nonfiction. And what you find when you examine the matter is that this shift is bound up with the move towards a culture where text-based communication has become subsumed under the wider and ever-expanding purview of an all-pervasive mass media realm where visual images are more dominant and therefore texts are progressively changed to fit comfortably into that milieu. (Have you checked out the way even popular magazines like People have altered themselves in the past two decades to become simpler and more akin on every page to TV screens or Webpages?)
This is also, of course, the very same trend that Neil Postman referred to in Amusing Ourselves to Death (which continues to emerge as a truly prophetic book, in the profound socio-religious sense, with each passing day, month, and year) when he issued his now-famous “Huxleyan warning” in the final chapter, where he argued that in this age of the mass electronic media’s total transformation of society and culture, we’re living not in Orwell’s 1984-ish future of a top-down totalitarian dystopia but in Huxley’s Brave New World-ish future of a dystopia-by-default, engineered by popular consent. He wrote,
There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first — the Orwellian — culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan — culture becomes a burlesque…What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
– Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), emphasis added
If this sounds disheartening on a veritably cosmic scale, we cannot, I think, take comfort in the response to the new information about the dumbing of America’s political discourse that NPR’s Tamara Keith received when she went fishing for it. After reporting that “Of the 10 members speaking at the lowest grade level, all but two are freshmen, and every one is a Republican,” and after quoting Sunlight’s Drutman that “Particularly among the newest members of Congress, as you move out from the center and toward either end of the political spectrum, the grade level goes down, and that pattern is particularly pronounced on the right,” Ms. Keith shares this response to all of these findings from a Republican consultant who endeavors to sound unruffled by them:
Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant and language guru, puts it this way: “It’s not an issue of dumbing it down; it’s an issue of cleaning it up.” He says there was a time when members seemed to use the biggest, most complicated phrases possible and didn’t really worry about whether the public could understand them. Now, he says, members are no longer just talking to each other. They’re talking to the public through cable TV and YouTube. “Life has changed,” Luntz says. “They not only expect but they demand that members of Congress communicate in a way that is more understandable and more meaningful to them.”
As I listened to Luntz speaking these words this morning, I immediately wondered about the generic and apparently ubiquitous “them” to whom he referred. Who exactly are “they,” the people for whom “communicating in a way that is more understandable and more meaningful” means turning serious public conversation into a form of baby-talk? Ms. Keith was thinking one step ahead of me, however, and helpfully answered my unspoken, indignant query by informing me, or rather reminding me, that “The average reading level of Americans is between eighth and ninth grade.”
Despite this sad demographic and educational/cultural fact, the efforts of people like Luntz to try and justify and/or explain away the devolution of political language are nothing but rationalizations and sophistry. Nobody is well-served when people whose ostensible purpose is to serve as leaders begin catering to linguistic childishness, or worse, falling victim to it themselves in their own psyches and sensibilities. And it’s not just the life or death of a viable culture that’s at stake here. We’re talking about the life or death of human civilization, and perhaps even of the human race itself. Aside from the ever-pressing issues of climate change, economic collapse, and peak fossil fuels with their respective Armageddon-level possibilities, the world is in a truly precarious state right now with respect geopolitical tensions (which of course interact synergistically with those other issues).
Only last week, the U.S. envoy to Israel announced that “at a certain point, we may have to make a judgment that the diplomacy will not work” with regard to sanctions on Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, and assured Israel that although the U.S. hopes it will not be necessary to use military force against Iran, “that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it’s ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.” (See “US envoy to Israel: US ready to strike Iran,” AP, May 17.) Reuters reported on the same day that, according to officials and other people close to Israel’s government, the top Israeli elite, after having made very hawkish pronouncements earlier this year about the possibility of attacking Iran, has suddenly clammed up. “Their language of late has been more guarded,” says Reuters’ Michael Stott, “and clues to their intentions more difficult to discern. ‘The top of the government has gone into lockdown,’ one official said. ‘Nobody is saying anything publicly. That in itself tells you a lot about where things stand.’” Another “senior Israeli figure” with “close ties to the leadership” said, “I think they have made a decision to attack. It is going to happen.” This person even stated a probable time frame of, basically, right now: “The window of opportunity is before the U.S. presidential election in November. This way they will bounce the Americans into supporting them.” Stott points out that an attack on Iran would have “such potentially devastating consequences across the volatile Middle East that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas even went so far as to predict in an interview with Reuters last week that it would be ‘the end of the world.’” He ends the piece by drawing an explicit parallel between the position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that of Winston Churchill in the 1930s, invoking the memory of Churchill’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to stop Hitler during the latter’s rise to power, when other European leaders wanted to appease him. “But Churchill,” writes Stott,
although eloquent on the dangers posed by the rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, ultimately failed to prevent Hitler’s ascent to power, the world war he unleashed or the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered. Netanyahu, those who know him say, is determined to avoid going down in history as the man who shirked his opportunity to stop Iran going nuclear.
So we are truly looking at the possibility of another world war being launched any time now. It’s all a terribly tangled and complex situation with almost inconceivably high stakes. And, to bring things back around to the overarching point, is this really a circumstance in which we, an American public that reads (and thus thinks and understands) on an eighth/ninth-grade level, need politicians who speak to us, and in many cases who authentically think about the world in their own right, on a junior high level as well? Certainly, high culture and linguistic savvy do not automatically make anyone, including politicians, virtuous or reasonable — the Nazi elite, remember, represented one of the most exquisitely cultured, educated, and linguistically sophisticated political regimes in history — but then, neither do childish and simplistic thinking and speaking, which can only lead to bona fide disaster in situations like this. For evidence, just witness America’s entire history in the twenty-first century, which is still, ominously, very young.
As you know, I’m very tuned into the doom meme, and I write and tweet a lot about past and current cultural variations on the fear and fascination of apocalypse. But I think I’ll never outdo George Carlin, who, in an absolutely brain-bending and jaw-dropping riff on the subject (see the video below), mounted the single most delirious, hilarious, and scandalous vision of The End that has ever been or will ever be articulated. What’s more, at the conclusion of it — and with a masterful control of tone — he brought it all down to a sudden and startling mood of melancholy, hope, and wistfulness. In short, it’s an amazing performance.
For the sake of introduction, here’s a transcription of how he starts:
I always hope that no matter how small the original problem is, it’s going to grow into bigger and bigger proportions and get completely out of control. And I’ll give you a concrete example. Let’s say a water main breaks in downtown Los Angeles, and it floods an electrical substation, knocking out all the traffic lights and tying up the entire city, and emergency vehicles can’t get through. And at the same time, one of those month-long global warming heat waves comes along, but there’s no air-conditioning, there’s no water for sanitation, so cholera, smallpox and dysentery break out and thousands of people start dying in the streets. But before they die, parasites eat their brains, and they go completely fucking crazy, and they storm the hospital, but the hospital can’t handle all the casualties, so these people rape all the nurses and set the hospital on fire. And the flames drive them even crazier, so they start stabbing social workers and garbage men. And a big wind comes along, and the entire city goes up in flames. And the people who are still healthy, they get mad at the sick people, and they start crucifying them, nailing them to crosses, trying on their underwear, shit like that. Then everybody smokes crack and PCP, and they march on city hall, where they burn the mayor at the stake, they strangle his wife, and take turns sodomizing the statue of Larry Flynt.
And at this point, it looks like pretty soon things are gonna start to get out of control.
And remember, that’s just the start.
Since it’s Carlin, be advised that, yes, of course, and as evidenced above, the language is totally NSFW.
This week’s link list is slightly shorter than usual, because my time and energy have been dominated for the past few days by the task of writing three essays for ABC-CLIO’s “Enduring Questions” academic reference database, in the enticingly titled category, “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy.” But there’s still plenty of worthwhile reading here, covering the categories of apocalyptic fears, the possibility (probability?) of a US military strike on Iran, the Wall Street-White House-Capitol Hill nexus of corruption, the rise of the American prison-industrial complex, the fate of paper books and speculative fiction genres in the era of the e-book, the influence of the I Ching on renowned Western intellectuals and artists, the role of Christianity in helping to launch Western science by shaping its philosophical foundations, a possible paradigm shift that’s in the offing for the theory of evolution, and the absolutely fascinating story of a man whose head injury from a mugging has resulted in his becoming a mathematical genius who sees mental image of mathematical diagrams and is apparently the only person in the world with the ability to draw fractals by hand.
* * *
Apocalypse How
Mike Deri Smith, The Morning News, February 28, 2012
Teaser: Big-budget films tell us earthquakes are bad, volcanic eruptions can be catastrophic, and meteorite strikes — barring the presence of Bruce Willis — may kill us all. Seeking expert advice on how scared we should be.
To recap the expert recommendations: Tsunami and earthquake education sometimes works, or could if done properly; volcano-monitoring systems aren’t always working, asteroid-warning systems need more work, and a universal flu vaccine? Well, we’re working on it. We clearly need experts to be more involved in policy decisions, considering their almost universal and very rational frustration. And natural disasters of all sizes, not just the worst-case scenarios, would benefit from some expert policy planning…[Haraldur Sigurdsson, an emeritus professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and the Indiana Jones of natural disasters, says,] “I hope that I can help in some way, by increasing our understanding of the way the Earth works, so that we can work with it — and stay out of the way when it becomes dangerous.” He points out that “with increasing population density, there are more people getting in harm’s way when the Earth takes a sneeze.” When the Earth sneezes the next time, society might catch more than a cold: It could reasonably be a flu strain as powerful as the one in Contagion. It could represent the end of life as we know it, as envisioned by Melancholia. The years-long winter envisioned by George R.R. Martin in A Game of Thrones isn’t so far off the mark should a strong enough volcano erupt—and the eruption of an unexpected super-volcano like in Volcano is closer to the truth than many of us are willing to accept.
The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington’s envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran. Dan Shapiro’s message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington’s resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program. Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force. “But that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it’s ready,” he said. “The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready”…President Barack Obama has assured Israel that the U.S. is prepared to take military action if necessary, and it is standard procedure for armies to draw up plans for a broad range of possible scenarios. But Shapiro’s comments were the most explicit sign yet that preparations have been stepped up. In his speech, Shapiro acknowledged the clock is ticking. “We do believe there is time. Some time, not an unlimited amount of time,” Shapiro said. “But at a certain point, we may have to make a judgment that the diplomacy will not work.”
Teaser: It’s bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it – with a big assist from Congress and the White House.
Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.” This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street…Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway’s Old Man — no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore…That means all those thousands of hours of debate and fierce negotiation spent hammering out Dodd-Frank two years ago might now go up in smoke in a matter of a few quiet minutes. Of the big-ticket items that were actually passed two years ago, the derivatives reforms have been completely gutted by loopholes, the Volcker Rule has been delayed for two years, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may be thrust under the budgetary control of Congress, which is determined to destroy it. And much of this is taking place with the assent of Democrats, for a very simple reason: because the name of the game isn’t cleaning up Wall Street, it’s cleaning out Wall Street — throwing a “yes” vote at a bank-approved bill to get them to pony up in an election year…That’s the underlying problem with cracking down on Wall Street: Our political-economic system has grown too knotted and unmanageable for democratic rule. While it’s incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it’s far easier — and more profitable to politicians — to kill it. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s. The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt. Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations. If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars. Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens…A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
Teaser: How their design will evolve in the age of the Kindle.
The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilights and Freedoms of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books…But a literary culture that has defined itself through paper books for centuries will surely feel the loss as they pass away…Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book’s other qualities — from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty — will take on more importance…Who will buy these new, well-made paper books? One likely result of the transition to e-books is that paper book culture will move further out of reach for those without disposable income. Debt-ridden college students, underemployed autodidacts, and the everyday mass of bargain-hunters will find better deals on the digital side of the divide. (Netflix for books, anyone?). As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors’ items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford…Bookshelves will survive in the homes of serious digital-age readers, but their contents will be much more judiciously curated. The next generation of paper books will likely rival the art hanging beside them on the walls for beauty, expense, and “aura” — for better or for worse…[But] the unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and late-edition hardcovers that line most of our shelves…are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventually — the scrapheap.
[W]ithin another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die…The [reason for this] is both simple and non-obvious: ebooks…Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work. You are an editor, presented with “Rule 34″: do you choose to market it as SF, as crime/police procedural, or as mainstream literary fiction? Wouldn’t it be better to market it as all three, with different cover designs and cover blurbs and marketing pitches and reader recommendations and reviews for each bookstore category?…[M]y point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, “if you liked X you’ll love Y” cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on). This is going to drastically affect the quality and content of the internal dialog within our genre
Here’s a crazy idea. First, you find an ancient Chinese philosophical text — let’s say the most influential book in China’s entire cultural tradition (and also pretty damned important in Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Tibet). Then you put it in the hands of some eighteenth century Jesuit missionaries in China who think it is a corrupted version of the Bible. After that, you go looking for a second group of Jesuits who hate the first group, even though they all call each other “brother,” and convince them to translate the book into Latin. Now Latin, as we all know, is a dead language and of no use to anyone (keep those cards and letters coming!), so you find additional people to translate the book into dozens of other languages, including English. What happens next? Well, suppose a counter-cultural movement develops in Europe and the Americas during the 1960s. Wouldn’t it be great if you had an exotic Asian text that you could embrace in order to show your disdain for conventional middle-class values and frozen TV dinners? And wouldn’t it be especially nice if you could use that text to tell fortunes, write poems, produce novels, compose music, choreograph dances, and create art? Boom! That’s exactly what has happened to the I Ching (also spelled Yijing), or Classic of Changes (also known as the Book of Changes).
[NOTE: The accompanying notes and slideshow offers capsule accounts of how the I Ching influenced Leibniz, Aleister Crowley, Jung, Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Bob Dylan.]
Teaser: Those who magnify recent controversies about science and religion, projecting conflict back into historical time, perpetuate a historical myth to which no historian of science would subscribe.
It is often assumed that the relationship between Christianity and science has been a long and troubled one…In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions. The idea, first proposed in the seventeenth century, that nature was governed by mathematical laws, was directly informed by theological considerations. The move towards offering mechanical explanations in physics also owed much to a particular religious perspective. The adoption of more literal approaches to the interpretation of the bible, usually assumed to have been an impediment to science, also had an important, in indirect, role in these deveolopments, promoting a non-symbolic and utilitarian understanding of the natural world which was conducive to the scientific approach. Finally, religion also provided social sanctions for the pursuit of science, ensuring that it would become a permanent and central feature of the culture of the modern West…Could modern science have arisen outside the theological matrix of Western Christendom? It is difficult to say. What can be said for certain is that it did arise in that environment, and that theological ideas underpinned some of its central assumptions. Those who argue for the incompatibility of science and religion will draw little comfort from history.
I called University of Chicago microbiologist James Shapiro, who’s now also blogging on HuffPost about science, to arrange an interview after noticing that we’d both recently been bashed by Darwinist Jerry Coyne in the same column. I reached Shapiro at home. He was engaging, although he described himself as a “reclusive person” — which he says he finds key to serious thinking. The commotion was over Shapiro’s book: Evolution: A View from the 21st Century since Coyne, also a University of Chicago professor, has an evolution text he’d like to keep relevant. I decided to have a look at Shapiro’s book and see exactly why Coyne was agitated…[He told me,] “We have this terrible dilemma in science. We need to be reductionists to get meaningful results and make observations. But when we take the observations and try to understand what they mean, then we have to stop being reductionists and become integrationists to understand how the things we’ve identified and singled out fit into the whole picture. We’ve lost sight of that need for integration with the successes of molecular biology. But I think we’re getting back to an integrationist view now because people are studying complex problems like cell biology and multicellular development using molecular tools. It’s becoming clear that there’s an interaction between the parts and the whole which is far more complex and multidirectional than people used to think. I think that that shift from reductionism to integrationism actually needs to happen in the physical sciences as well. They still hang on very much to the idea that you can have ‘a theory of everything.’ I’m rather dubious about that.”
Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He’s the only person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade ago. “I’m obsessed with numbers, geometry specifically,” Padgett said. “I literally dream about it. There’s not a moment that I can’t see it, and it just doesn’t turn off.” Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, a college degree or even a background in math. His talent was born out of a true medical mystery that scientists around the world are still trying to unravel. Ten years ago, Padgett was only interested in two things: working out and partying. One night he was walking out of a karaoke club in Tacoma when he was brutally attacked by muggers who beat and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Padgett said they were after his $99 leather jacket. “All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the ground and I thought, ‘I’m gonna get killed,’” he said. At the time, doctors said he had a concussion, but within a day or two, Padgett began to notice something remarkable. This college dropout who couldn’t draw became obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams, but didn’t know what they were. “I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere,” he said. “Every single little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation.” The diagrams he draws are called fractals and Padgett can draw a visual representation of the formula Pi, that infinite number that begins with 3.14…A scan of Padgett’s brain showed damage that was forcing his brain to overcompensate in certain areas that most people don’t have access to, Brogaard explained. The result was Padgett was now an acquired savant, meaning brilliant in a specific area.
[NOTE: The page at ABC News features a video story. I can't embed it here, but this one gets across the same point, and features some of Padgett's astonishing artwork:]
