Marat

If you don't look back and have the occasional regret, then you are not a complete human. You have to live in all three dimensions of human experience -- past, present, and future -- to be fully grounded. The trick is to be able to look back, regret, wish you could do things over, but then still be able to focus creatively on the future.

How erudite that it's in the form of a classic, Shakespearian sonnet! But those eye rhymes, like 'reaction' going with 'misconception,' will have me waking up tonight in a cold sweat.

Condoms were illegal just 60 years ago in the United States, even for married couples: see Griswold v. Connecticut. All cultures fear the power of sex and seek to affirm their ability to control it, either actually or symbolically; just look at primitive societies which practice female circumcision, or which cut the penis to ensure the escape of semen during ejaculation. Perhaps sexual restrictions help stabilize the social order in some helpful way, since people do not go around promiscuously interfering with the sexual bonds of others, which would create conflicts, and are not constantly interrupting their work to fulfill the more pressing demands of immediate gratification. Societies which do allow absolute promiscuity and have no sexual taboos, such as the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa, are also primitive cultures without much internal organization to maintain. It is also possible that sexual control diverts the libido to more productive energies which are beneficial to society, even though they harm the individual. I am sure everyone knows a few bright academics and scientists who seem to have lost their creativity as soon as their sex drive was satisfied. But even if rules inhibiting sexual happiness have some utilitarian benefit to society, is society just in asserting its right to impose such rules on people, thereby denying them an essential personal freedom and doing them injury? The basic concept of a liberal society is that we should allow as much personal freedom as possible as long as others are not harmed by it and society is not severely disrupted by it, so certainly the panoply of rules limiting sexual happiness should be rigorously scrutinized to ensure that there are no more restrictions than are necessary. Probably more than half of the current restrictions serve no rational utilitarian or rights-protecting goal.

Primitive peoples today who live in very hot climates always seem to wear some clothing to hide their primary sexual organs. Perhaps this indicates there is some transcultural value in hiding these organs? Secondary sexual organs are often exposed in the same societies, and even today in Martinique the native women go around bare-breasted, in contrast to the native women on the neighboring island of St. Lucia, who wear shirts. This is because the colonial masters of Martinique were French while those of St. Lucia were British, and the British until their rule ended in 1979 used to fine native women for appearing shirtless, so the practice of wearning shirts is now second-nature.

There are in principle an infinite regress of fanciful stories we can invent as hypotheses to explain the moral order of the universe. Why not say, for example, that the order of the universe is explained by Moe, Larry, and Curly struggling over possession of our souls, with each one of them represening some vector of human personality, and whenever Moe manages to poke Curly's eyes with two fingers, we all become more evil ... , etc. It seems that all these hypothetical constructs suffer from four problems: First, they are not economical, and posit far more details than are required to motivate whatever hypothesis they are promoting. Second, they do not so much 'explain' the moral order of the universe as parallel it by a mythological picture which does not so much deepen our understanding as depict it cinematically. Third, they can never show that they are unique, since any number of stories can be matched up with the real world morally considered according to the vague and loose rules of fit that are required in such exercises. Fourth, they are unnecessary, since the most ordinary explanation of human morality is always to be preferred by basic methodological principles, and human morality can be easily explained as a set of rules for human social cooperation based on the posit that all our equal and are to be granted as much autonomy as is consistent with the equal autonomy of others and the effective functioning of society.

To debate about whether a logically self-contradictory (infintely good and powerful but still allows evil), mythological entity imagined by Bronze Age nomads is male or female, and to care deeply about this, seems preposterous. It's like becoming outraged over the nerve of someone who dares to say that Hercules wears a truss. I had the misfortune the other day to read the feminist author Susan Okin's 1989 essay, "Justice as Fairness," which criticized the famous philosopher John Raws vociferously for his vicious sexism in constantly using the referent 'he' for persons of no identified gender in his 1973 book, 'A Theory of Justice.' Is Ms. Okin really so young that she is not aware that if you submitted a book to a publisher in 1973 using the female referent for people the manuscript would have been rejected as illiterate? The weird chic of using female referents for everything to prove that you are not sexist is an invention of the last decade or so, and before then it was unheard of. But this obsession with male or female forms of reference is really just the analog of the prudery of earlier generations which was so terrified of sex that it even covered table legs with cloths because of their analogy with the naked legs of women. Now today we are so terrified of sexism that the only way to get a journal article published is to write, 'The general was rescued by the fireman, after which she thanked her,' even if we don't actually know the genders of the actors involved in the story. From the perspective of European languages, where it is obvious that the gender of reference is conventional and grammatical, and has absolutely nothing to do with biological sex, this current American obsession with using only female grammatical forms as though this could do anything real to help women is ridiculous. In German, for example, we have 'die Wache' (the (feminine) guard), 'der Gebaermutter,' (the (masculine) uterus), and 'das Maedchen' (the (neuter) young girl). So grammatical gender clearly has nothing to do with the actual gender of people, and the convention of proper English up until very recently, that the referent 'he' or 'him' is used for persons of unknown gender AND the deity, says absolutely nothing sexist; it is just a linguistic convention.

I can't back up the evidence I cited in my previous observations with any cited sources, since it just comes from my personal experience of working for the last 20 years in a major urban hospital.

Some cultures seem to have a very creative solution to anger in which people freely and easily express their negative emotions towards each other, but somehow this doesn't lead to rage, hatred, or physical violence, but is instead readily integrated into normal patterns of social interaction. This is in contrast to other cultures which seem to have to repress feelings of anger completely, since if they are expressed, an emotional explosion with socially intolerable consequences results. I have often been present in foreign cultures where I was certain the situation was about to come to fisticuffs, based on my American assumptions of how people respond to various insults and abusive behaviors, but was astonished to find that the tension magically simmered down and the people all remained friends. Are Americans more inclined to repress anger because in a culture with so many different subcultures they can never be sure of the other person's response to expressed emotion? In contrast, perhaps more homogenous cultures feel like one big family so they can express insults with fewer social risks. A far preferable strategy to either expressing anger or repressing it is just to develop a certain intellectual detachment from yourself, other people, and the immediacy of life, so that whatever happens it doesn't engage you in any strong emotional way so that you have to suppress or censor your feelings.

I've taken a zinc supplement every day now for two decades, and yet I frequently develop serious colds. What type of amounts are we talking about here to get an adequate response?

What if we viewed names as descriptions rather than as proper names? Thus if the way I now think and feel is quite close to the way that the historical figure of Diogenes once actually thought and felt, perhpas my name should now be Diogenes(20th cent). Or if Lemur and I are in fact similar in many ways, perhaps we should have names that indicate that similarly, such as Lemur(1) and Lemur(2). If our personal histories and psychologies are nearly the same but our characteristic thought-patters are quite different, then perhaps we should be called Lemur/Marat(p, t(a,b)). Perhaps we should even be made responsible for each other's debts and crimes, credited with each other's training and university degrees, or regarded as being married to each other's spouse, etc., according to how similar or dissimilar our relevant predicates are. Why treat the limits of the physical body as the ultimate reason for distinguishing the assignment of blame, responsibility, friendships, professional ties, and associations to one person or another, rather than letter the more wide-ranging phenomena of a common personality, a common thinking style, or a common emotional history be the reasons for referring these responsibilities to one person or another? When a criminal commits his crime let us say that he has personal history, psychological make-up, and characteristic thinking patterns A. But when he is caught, tried, and punished for his crime, perhaps many years after the criminal act itself, he is now quite different in personal history, psychology, and thought-patters, so let us call his new self B. Then the question arises, what is the justice of punishing B for what A has done, given that these two 'persons' are quite distinct?

In terms of international law, the entire response to prisoners taken in the invasions of the Middle East is absurd. That someone like Omar Khadr, defending his homeland against a foreign invader, can be treated as a criminal for this action, while the imperialists conducting a neo-colonial invasion of Khadr's country are treated as heroes, is more than ridiculous. The problem is that if people taken prisoner in these invasions are treated as prisoners of war, they then come under the protections of the Geneva Convention which prohibit them being tortured or mistreated, which require that they be released when hostilities cease, and which forbid their being tried as criminals for their 'military' actions, unless these can somehow be demonstrated by recognized principles of international law to have been war crimes. To think that the nation of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln, the first country in world history seriously to stake its reputation to the defense of human rights, should now be twisting and turning to contrive some feeble excuse why repeatedly waterboarding prisoners 'is not actually torture because it does not cause pain equivalent to organ failure,' is beyond belief.

A friend of mine was very much like you, at least externally considered, in that he was just about to complete his Ph.D. in math at M.I.T. and felt that he had wasted his life because math hadn't turned out to be as interesting as he had once imagined. I think this problem often plagues mathematicians, since they are either working on an inspiring breakthrough or not, and the fallow periods can make it seem as though all the spark has gone out of life, even when another interesting problem to work on is around the corner. I have often found in my own work that periods when I thought I was making no progress were in fact quite fruitful, since I was unconsciously accumulating knowledge and preparing the groundwork for more tangible productivity later. If it does turn out that the vein of math has been mined out for you, you are lucky in that math is the language of the sciences, as has been pointed out already, and you can always make the switch to something more concrete, like theoretical physics, with only a few more years investment, and your math background will still be important and valuable, and thus not wasted time. Alternatively, you could even try a more creative solution, like switching into philosophical and mathematical logic, Goedel's theorem and the like, which can be quite a fascinating field for someone with a mathematial background, but which would transplant you into an entirely new and stimulating environment of philosophy. The final thing to keep in mind is that all defintions of the purpose of life are arbitrary, since no one an ultimately say what is the best thing for sentient beings to do while passing their time under the shadow of inevitable death. For example, if you were a primitive tribesman from Papua New Guinea, your life would be defined now as worthless because you had not yet proved yourself a successful headhunter by killing at least one person outside the tribe and displaying his shrunken head on your belt.

It is interesting to consider studies of why women stay with men who hit them, and are often surprisingly committed to their relationships with these men. Some studies have suggested that physical violence plays a dynamical role in these relationships, so that the woman deliberately induces the man to hit her, because she then enjoys the emotional bond that reforms around the man's regret and renewed courtship efforts to compensate for having hit her. This then causes incidents of domestic violence to function, perversely and pathologically, as devices to renew emotional bonds in couples who cannot accomplish this in less neurotic ways.

Nudist colonies always claim that nakedness desexualizes people. If the sexuality of people is not concealed, then it seems more like the natural thing it is, so it becomes more matter-of-fact and less alluring and enticing. But a downside of nudity is that some people might be subject to cruel comparisons, since clothing could not serve to disguise differences as it now does. Hideous scars, charcot joints, uncontrolled cancerous growths, teratomas, cornus, Cushing's Syndrome's deformations, cachexia, etc. might all be well hidden among clothed people but open to public horror in a nudist world. Clothes are the great leveller, as many schools using a school uniform seem to recognize.

The concept of God is usually defined as an entity which is omniscient, omnipotent, and infinitely good. But omniscience does not imply that God has to be everything he knows, since knowledge can and usually does extend to things which are not in or of the knower. Knowledge usually implies a gap between the knower and the known. Omnipotence also does not imply, as you seem to assume, that God himself 'is' everything, since having the power to do X does not necessarily mean being X. God might have powers which he reserves, and his refusal always to exercise them could leave many things outside his individual nature and control, keeping them ontologically distinct from him. Infinite goodness doesn't mean being everything either, since people who are more good than other people are not any more ontologically extensive than evil people. So by all these three defining predicates of God, there seems to be no reason why he also has to be everything, so that he cannot be just the good and not the bad. Now we can blame him for withholding his omnipotent power to correct evil, which he should logically be willing to exercise for the good if he is both omnipotent and infinitely good, but that is separate from the issue of God's being having to include everything within itself.

Perceptual psychology has established that we always approach new data with a strategy for optimally processing it and deriving meaning from it. Informally you can confirm that for yourself by observing the way you look for something missing: You don't just survey the room with an open mind and a soft focus, but instead you superimpose the template of the missing object on the jumble of shapes and colors you see in front of you, always looking with the predetermined strategy of matching images received to the image sought. All thought is in this sense an intelligent use of stereotypes. Would we be able to see trees if we looked at a forest without ever having had our brains pre-equipped by language and culture with a certain disposition to unite objects primarily by shape rather than color, or if we did not already have th word 'tree' as a pre-existing stereotypic template into which we could feed and organize the vertically arrayed impressions of brown, black, tan, and grey uneven solidity? So since all normal thinking is ultimately based on prejudgment, it is only to be expected that this operates on higher levels as well, so when we see a tall, thin man with a short haircut, a stiff bearing, a saber scar on his left cheek, and a monocle over one eye come into the office of an international criminal lawyer in 1946, we don't wonder whether he is a Caribbean limbo dancer.

The unspoken cultural assumption that what we 'really' look like is how we appear in a full face shot taken straight on in bright lighting with a smile on our face is an interestingly arbitrary notion. Why isn't my own idea of myself, as well as the official public image of me, not the back of my head, the image of my feet (quite individual), or a picture of the back of my left hand? Very young African children, when asked to draw an elephant, usually spontaneously draw it from an aerial view, whereas European children given the same task draw it from the side. Photos taken of people in the 19th century invariably showed them glaring sternly and proudly into the camera, but never smiling, since the assumption then was that the canonical way people 'look' is how they appear when they have composed themselves to appear dignified. No doubt an enormous cultural and psychological shift is represented in the fact that we now assume we should look friendly in photos. Another odd thing you can notice if you look at pictures of people arranged by age is that they all look genuinely happy up until about age 25, and after that their smiles start to look strained. Why is this? Does the ultimately tragic nature of human existence begin to dawn on people after that age? To publish a standard photo of someone to guide searchers can be quite misleading when they are looking for a dead body, since once the musculature can no longer tense up to compose our face in the usual way we seek to present ourselves to the world, we don't look anything like ourselves. It is always astonishing to compare photos of people in life with the same person just a few moments after death; television and movies give a highly misleading idea of how different dead people look than living ones, and the usual fictional trope, 'I thought he was sleeping but it turned out he was dead!' could never happen. For example, since it requires effort to keep your mouth closed (as I am inadvertently illustrating in this post, I'm afraid), dead people do not close their mouths as they do in the world of film. Generally the dead look more like a melted version of their living selves, for which a photo taken during life is little aid in identification.

The purported Cameroon 'dinosaur' is a tad more serious than Area 51, given that the cryptozoology team from the University of Chicago considered it worth investing the money required to conduct an African expedition to investigate it.

I don't think we can simply assume that the UN has a monopoly on what is right in international law. While it is true that the UN can make new international law, by article 24 of the UN Charter the International Court of Justice retains a right to ensure that the actions of the UN, enforced through the Security Council, are consistent with the ultimate purposes of the UN Charter, so in theory international law should prevail as a standard of review over what the UN contingently happens to do. This being the case, then, the international law rules about prescription and adverse possession of territory, which I discussed above, should be regarded as superior to UN action, so its recognition of the state of Israel could be illegitimate at international law. It is said that Israel allows people of other faiths to live there, but of course it does not recognize a right of return to Israel of the Palestinian people whose grandparents and parents, or who personally were expelled from Israel. If it were to recognize such a right, and were not to deny the vote to such new residents on religious or ethnic grounds, it would find its present identity as a 'Jewish state' voted down by the new majority of its population, and since it cannot tolerate that happening, its self-definition forces it to be religiously intolerant and/or racist. In contrast, a formal, secular state with no predetermined identity like the U.S., which is always open to any range of democratic redeterminations of its cultural character, as long as these occur by legal process, can admit anyone and everyone without discrimination, beyond the standard background discrimination all states apply, which is either native birth or descent from someone with citizenship, variously either the father, the mother, or both parents. When either or both ethnicity and religion can characterize a group, there will always be difficulties determining its membership. Ironically, the Nazis became experts at this, and had a massive administrative appartus, the Rassensbemerkungsamt, to make these fine determinations. The fact that veterans of the First World War were exempt from being treated with the legal disabilities of Jews even if they were Jewish, or that Jewish foreigners resident in Germany were not legally discriminated against, shows how complex these distinctions were. (Ironically, many US aspirants for medical study, excluded from US medical schools by the Jewish quotas in force at the time, went to Germany for their medical degrees when the Nazi regime was in power in the 1930s; a notable example is Prof. George Rosen, a famous Yale Professor of the History of Medicine). Not to be forgotten are those highly religious Jews who contingently find themselves now living in Israel who detest the Israeli state as an impeity, since it purports to realize in this world something which should be regarded solely as an ideal.

The human ego most profoundly fears anything that suggests that it is not eternal. This is ultimately what builds pyramids and cathedrals. It is not surprising, then, that when the ego realizes it has come close to dying, it seeks to paper over its terror at its own extinction by vigorously imagining experiences like having risen up over the body to see its dying physicality below it. The silliness of that story is palpable, however, given that the whole idea that the afterlife or heaven is 'up' relative to ordinary life, so the spirit of the dying person sees its body from above, is just a cultural artifact, since there is no true 'up' or 'down' in space. The Ancient Greeks would have told you the afterlife is 'down' relative to where we live ('the underworld'), so no doubt their own near-death experiences would have them looking up!

I think you're missing an essential distinction, Rigney, which disguises some points of agreement between us. I entirely agree that it is silly to try to argue who 'really' owns what land by tracing possession back several centuries or even to the earliest archeological evidence, as defenders of native land rights often do in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Since all nations now existing on the planet represent territory conquered or illegally taken in one way or the other, it seems foolish to make 'I was here first' distinctions by tracing historical lineages back to their ultimate orgins. But this is all dealt with in the application to international law of the concept of 'prescription,' often called 'adverse possession' in domestic law, or more colloquially, 'squatters' rights.' This legal concept, as I outlined in earlier posts, simply states that after someone has illegally occupied land for a certain amount of time, it becomes legally his, even if originally he was just a trespasser. In domestic law the number of years of occupation required to transform a mere transpasser into the new owner varies with the jurisdiction and the type of land, but it varies usually from 20 to 40 years. In international law the time limits are still a matter of dispute, but land adversely occupied by a 'trespasser' for centuries would clearly legally belong to the trespasser, just to quieten title claims. In the case of Israel, however, sufficient time has not passed since their initial occupation of the land now occupied, so since the title is disputable given the way it was acquired, others can still raise valid claims against it. After another century of continued occupation, however, most international lawyers would concede that no one can dispute Israel's right to exist.

Doesn't it seem profoundly odd that the omniscient author of the universe would make salvation depend on my being able to perform the mental gymnastics required actually to believe that all the nonsensical Biblical rituals 'explaining' (to a Bronze Age nomad, perhaps) how one scapegoat dying for the sins of other people somehow solves the problem of sin? If I can't manage that peculiar sort of mental trick of suspending my rational faculty long enough to take the whole thing seriously, then am I really 'evil' and deserving of eternal damnation, or am I just too sensible? If the metaphysics of the cleansing of sin for other people requires that God become a man to suffer for mankind, then the whole approach is nonsensical, since there is no way to pack something essentially infinitely intelligent, infinitely powerful, and infinitely good into its instantiation as a man, which is something essentially finitely intelligent, finitely powerful, and finitely good. If X becomes a Y which is essentially different from it, then X simply ceases to exist and a Y appears in its place; X does not become Y -- unless you are a Bronze Age nomad who doesn't know how to think in any seriously analytical way. Of course, it does seem to make perfect sense if we are talking about Mediterranean culture circa 30 A.D., when it was the mark of every prominent individual that he was declared a god, so these god-man syntheses (e.g., Hercules was half god, half man) were quite commonly accepted.

I spent a summer in the Philippines and asked a few people about atheism there. The universal reply was that 'there are no atheists in the Philippines.' Since most of the population is extremely poor, and the government does not offer free primary schooling, people are simply not given the intellectual equipment to develop a critical perspective on the ideological stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church. There was also a well-deserved, nascent revolt against the government of Gloria Aroyo when I was there, but as soon as the Church expressed its disapproval of this movement, it exaporated. Mexico at least has a strong tradition of criticism of accepted cultural dogma, and so along with its occasionaly forays into a sudden, revolutionary spirit, socialism, or even communism (Trotsky was given asylum there), it has opened a few windows of insight into atheism. Poland is so strongly Catholic that even its Communist government didn't dare displace the faith, as it did in Soviet Russia. Ireland as well has developed that peculiar integration of Catholicism, government, and culture that hardens into a type of cement which blocks all critical insight into its flaws among nearly all of those born into it. Many Islamic countries seem to suffer from the same phenomenon, although in their case the problem is even worse, since these countries lack the historical experience of the Renaissance, the Reformation, Historicism, Relativism, and Existentialism, so the cultural resources for radical criticism of existing belief systems are lacking. Protestant belief, since it originates in a critical perspective on traditional Catholic dogma, is always more open to self-criticism, especially given its emphasis on the private faith and conviction of the individual believer, so it never produces as strong a hindrance to critical, atheistic insight as Catholicism does. A useful if indirect measure of the strength of religious belief in various countries is to consult international tables of suicide rates. Since suicide is the ultimate and most radical act of critical insight into life possible, where suicide rates are very low -- such as in Mexico and the Philippines -- it is a sure sign that the critical insight necessary to escape religious dogma has not developed, so religion is irremovably strong.

As a part of its racist campaign to ensure White dominance of the government of South Africa, South Africa created various enclave states to which the local Blacks were assigned, thus removing them from constituting a threat to the White control over South Africa as a whole. This seems to be strongly analogous to Israel driving out Palestinians to various imaginary homelands for them (e.g., Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt), and then pretending that they really belong there because these are all Arab states and so are the Palestinians, just so they cannot claim to live in Israeli territory where they or their parents and grandparents were born. The central problem for Israel is that it declares itself to be 'a Jewish state.' Thus even though it can and does allow non-Jews to live and vote in Israel, it can never afford to allow all the non-Jews who have a valid claim to live in Israel as citizens -- that is, all the Palestinians who were born there, whose parents were born there and driven out, or whose grandparents were born there and driven out -- to live and vote there, since then Israel would cease to be what it is now defined forever to be, i.e., a Jewish state. The essence of democracy is that a state can become and assume the character of anything that the majority of its citizens want it to become, and in this sense Israel forever commits itself to being anti-democratic by defining itself as forever a Jewish state. This means that it has to be racist as well, since it has to ensure that sufficient numbers of non-Jews never return to Israel so as to create a voting majority which would no longer endorse the identity of Israel as a Jewish state. This finally means that it has to adopt a policy of ethnic cleansing, of keeping from returning to Israel those who were either personally, or whose parents or grandparents, were pushed out of Israel by Jewish immigrants and their state, which improperly refused to recognize their Ottoman land titles and thus deprived them of their homeland.

Our debt is not out of hand, but rather, our national government spending is too low for a modern, humane, developed, industrial society. The total proportion of the GDP taken by government in the U.S. is only 28%, in contrast to France, where it is 46%. Germany, where it is 40%, and the United Kingdom, where it is 39%. When you subtract the further 2% of GDP from the U.S. government tax intake which represents useless bloating of the defense budget beyond the defense expenditures rational required, you see that the U.S. is trying to get by with spending 26% of GDP on its real needs, which is a fraction of what other nations spend. Of course this is going to produce a huge deficit, not because spending is too high, but because taxes are unrealistically low for what a modern government does.