26 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 26th, 2009 @ 04:09:19 pm, using 1349 words, 62 views
If the current efforts to reestablish the same financial institutions and their officials who put us in this god-awful mess weren’t enough to establish how delusional our current period in history is, or the horror of debating whether waterboarding someone at all, much less dozens of times (all to stop that atom bomb that’s about to go off . . . when exactly??), or the prospect of watching polar caps disappear while we debate in the mode of professional wrestling, then I guess there’s no way to convince you that, far from the rational beings we claim to be, we are pretty much psychotic and thousands of people are in institutions for far less craziness than we’re exhibiting.
It’s understandable how we are this way. Our minds are built from birth around finding regularities and patterns on which we can base action and inaction. Sometimes the regularities and patterns are simple enough, allowing more or less successful action and response, belief and truth. Mostly, however, the world is varyingly complex, too hard for us to sense, much less understand. So we build incomplete pattern structures in our heads, the easiest and most accessible form of which are (no, not scientific formulas and theories, although they are the same basic thing) stories, fantasies, myths. As long as they don’t get us killed or harmed (most times), we can survive day to day, year to year, entire lives functioning on partly or even completely wrong stories. Until reality steps in (like it did to the Indian tribe that believed their sacred dance made them invisible to enemies, or to the Soviet Union, for example, or that time you just knew you had found the love of your life). We’ve gone on and on here (although not lately since it’s so self-evident now) about the fantasies and stories of the Chicago Vatican, I mean, school of econ that took a few real-life items and spun them into the elaborate myths that led us to the debacle that we now face and which guide our President and his econ priests even yet. It’s so very hard to give up your stories, even when reality insists, especially the ones that comfort us most, that give us our worth, that include us in groups. That’s why the very best cultural stories last so long. Like “free market” stories, and “democracy” stories, and sectarian hatred stories.
Which leads us to the best stories of all, our religion stories, the ones that tells us why we’re here, what our purpose is, why we’re special enough to be chosen above all other creation. Every time they’ve been put to do-able tests of reality, they fail, but, because most of the time we can survive those failures, or investment in them convinces us to give our own lives up, we hang on and on to them. Giving up those stories would be like addicts coming off the drugs or dependents becoming responsible for their own lives. Too hard for most. Better not to even discuss, much less confront, the problems the stories have meeting reality. Just hope for the best. Call it “faith” while you’re at it. That feeds your story about yourself very well.
Finding the people who have started with the stories but let reality guide them to, well, reality is a rare and, to some of us anyway, treasured event. That’s why I’ve been reading Bart Ehrmann’s works lately, describing the truly tortured road he has travelled to let reality win out over the much more comfortable and comforting delusions that made up his and others’ religious beliefs over their lives. Ehrmann, a religion professor, has produced yet another work, Jesus Interrupted, which, as he admits, simply goes through what is taught and known in seminaries across the world, all the ways the Bible, especially the New Testament, the Gospels, contradict themselves because they are stories with the purposes of stories, not reality. As such, he has challenged much of the comfortable and drawn the predictable response, as this review indicates:
One of Ehrman’s chief critics is the theologian and author James White, a leading practitioner of apologetics, the branch of theology devoted to defending and proving the orthodox faith. White denounces Ehrman as an apostate guided by deepanti-Christian bias. He charges in one Internet post that Ehrman has “moved far beyond the realm of his narrow expertise in his last three most popular books, all of which are designed to do one thing: destroy Christian faith.”
If criticisms of Ehrman veer toward the personal it’s because his evidence — the Bible’s own text — is what it is. And there is no denying the inconsistencies he surfaces between the various Gospels and letters that form the New Testament.
Not exactly reality-based. But as the reviewer notes:
Ehrman’s book has met with a fierce reaction from some quarters, which is understandable. Who among us isn’t inclined to fight back when our deepest, most cherished beliefs are challenged? But there is no need to demonize him as a “wolf” on the prowl against the church, as one critic has. His ideas, like so many other new thoughts and new insights that keep coming around with the surety of the seasons, need not be regarded as insults against God or bids to prove the Bible false.
Rather, an eye to church history and the big picture leads to an appreciation of the inevitability — even desirability — of varying perspectives and changing interpretations around the complex and challenging meaning of the figure, Jesus, around whom the New Testament revolves. Ehrman’s evidence and argument leave one with the distinct impression that belief diversity receives an endorsement from the people you might least expect: the compilers of the Bible itself.
That’s the thing about the Bible. Locking into your story, the one that makes you saved, a hero, special, better than others, all those very human and very delusional things that have made religion one of the greatest sources of evil and hatred in human history, overlooks what’s actually there in its history and pages. A life framed around the story of human hubris and its consequences and the better course of accepting one’s delusional humanity is what the Bible is about and would be a life best led. As Jesus said, there are two and only two basic rules for life–never think you’re God and always think about the impact of your actions on others and don’t do anything you wouldn’t want done to you. That’s it. As he and Hillel, the other great Rabbi of the period, said, the rest is commentary. In other words, don’t live an exaggerated, self-exulting, self-exalting life and don’t think your stories are truth. People who get to there are the closest to the message of all the Bible, the thread that unites all its pages. Those who buy off on the stories we’ve woven from the bits and pieces of our choosing over the millenia, the stories that make us believe in magic and spirits and other beliefs that get the less fortunate institutionalized, can often avoid the reality, as Ehrman says his friends (and in another book, his wife) do, and never face the consequences. But as various parts of the world show every day, the stories are not benign, and propagating them has not done the world any favors. In fact, if delusions and wish-fulfillment underlie the grandest of the stories we tell, no wonder we are so hesitant to rely on actual evidence of reality to face the climate, economy, or our torture-approving selves that derive logically from that psychosis.
Ehrman is a brave man. Reality is hard and unforgiving. Easier, like his “smart” friends, to embrace fiction and myth, especially when it keeps you popular. He’s clearly still wrestling with the loss. But he’s also aware that a life lived in delusion can’t limit those delusions just to grand magicians in the sky. As we face the reality of a planet that will very likely not support our way of life much longer, perhaps his path was the one we all should have taken.
23 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 23rd, 2009 @ 07:51:31 pm, using 752 words, 31 views
I gave up on the Catholic Church a long time ago. I grew up being told eating fish on Friday would condemn me to Hell and then suddenly it was okay. Some guy in Rome decided. From then on it kept seeming more and more like a con game, at least before I learned about institutions and how their sole interests most often are power and self-preservation. That was well before the whole “come sit on my lap, little boy” cover-up immorality and the whole hypocrisy on abortion protesting but not death penalty protesting. Jesus actually talked about the death penalty and its acceptability; he never said a recorded word about abortion, just like homosexuality. Plus, as I read and read the New Testament and books about it, it became clearer to me that Jesus would have had little to do with the Catholic Church as personified by its leadership and zealots. He was a Jew, for one thing. But then you can say that accurately about every church calling itself Christian these days.
But the thing about growing up Catholic was that for every a**hole priest or nun (and I met a few), there were some truly good people wearing those weird clothes. And for all the perversion of Jesus’ mission and self-promotion of powerbrokers in much of Catholic philosophy and organization, some of the Doctrine is very powerful and good in historical terms, worthy of practice and reverence. I can’t honestly tell you what parts of my personal belief and moral systems could be separated from what I heard regularly in Masses without fatal harm to the rest of it. So, Catholic hierarchy and power, to Hell with them. But Catholic lessons and most of the laity, some stuff there worth keeping.
Which sounds like the message of James Carroll’s Practicing Catholic. A priest himself, Carroll writes regularly for the Boston Globe and has award-winning books on deep topics that also describe his deep humanity. But he’s not exactly persona grata with the Catholic mafiosos although, as this book apparently shows, he’s not giving up on his Church without a fight, even if every other fighter of the same fight has been ground down by the oppressive mass that it has become. No, I haven’t read it yet, but I plan to. I HAVE read these two reviews, the first short, the second longer, depending on your interest. Here’s a bit of the first to see if that’s where you want to go:
As a Catholic of Carroll’s persuasion, I find the intellectual ammo he brings to bear potent. Traditionalists will have a big problem with him, though thoughtful ones will recognize the need to confront his arguments, since on many matters the majority of American Catholics stand with Carroll, not the Vatican. He wittily disposes of the argument against women’s ordination, which is premised on the fact that the Twelve Apostles were all men: “No Celts were among Jesus’s Apostles, but the Irish can be ordained.”
And of the second if you want a longer trip:
The movement for a more inclusive church hit a high point in the 1960s, when the Vatican II council approved celebrating mass in the vernacular, and defined the church as a “pilgrim people … always in need of purification,” Carroll writes.
But while Vatican II ushered in reforms, it also incited “Catholic fundamentalists” – Carroll includes current Pope Benedict XVI among that group – to attempt to retain centralized church control via actions in three key areas.
Birth control is one. A 1964 encyclical ruled that the pope alone handles teaching on birth control, even though there was no history of church teaching on it, Carroll writes.
And refusing to acquiesce on birth control, “There was no way the Church could ease up on the sexual demand it imposed on clergy.” One result of imposed celibacy, Carroll writes, was that some priests became cold, others secretive – a “petrified clerical culture,” that was somehow complicit with the many archbishops who simply moved abusive priests, rather than handing them over to authorities.
Third, Carroll claims a manipulation of Scripture was used to justify “clergy-sponsored discrimination by gender.” Mary Magdalen was transformed from an “important disciple” into a repentant prostitute, disempowering her “so that her succeeding sisters in the Church would not compete with men for power.”
These challenges remain for today’s Catholics to address.
Good stuff, challenging stuff, like Jesus’ real work and message for us. It sounds like you could actually leave your sons with Carroll.
21 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 21st, 2009 @ 06:50:33 pm, using 101 words, 114 views
Haven’t mentioned the clever Bonk lately, but Laelaps at Science Blogs has a quick note up on the book and links us to another review and to a blog book club (see the comments) going on it elsewhere. Again, good science writing isn’t that easy, and Bonk is Mary Roach’s third extra-base hit in a row. She could hit for the cycle here, but how do you top a book where you volunteer yourself and your husband for an experiment to let a sex researcher MRI you in the act? It’s kinda scary to think of. (So stop thinking of it!)
20 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 20th, 2009 @ 05:48:10 pm, using 292 words, 30 views
In fairness, this post is actually a review of a reviewer of Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, which would make this Reviewing Reviewers Reviewing Reviewers (god, that was hard to type). In any case, this is what reviewing reviewers should look like, links to the review, a few key excerpts, discussions of what’s good, what needs disagreement. I enjoy this topic because I worked with sociologists for a number of years who would head-nod toward genetics as possibly, maybe, somehow, slightly having an oh-so-minor impact on behavior in the face of overwhelming social and environmental impact. This was while in a state in which the individual is seen as totally responsible for anything good (supporting role: Jesus) and for anything bad (supporting role: Satan) and nothing in the environment has anything to do with how we turn out. Of course, even those decades ago, it was clear that neither side had accommodated themselves to the entity that is the blended elements of each, despite whatever lip service might have occurred. It’s not even a matter of the sum of their parts–it’s what happens as the whole of their combination, kind of a Gaia thing: . And I’m not convinced from the summary in this review and from a quick skim I’ve done of Nisbett’s book that Nisbitt, a sociologist, fully gets it either. Still, I’ll read the book before I conclude anything. In the meantime, enjoy this interesting review of a review and check the book out for yourself.
[And coincidentally or not, at the same time, there’s an interview with Nisbett (and quick book summary) available here that goes into some detail on his thesis that might help you pull it all together.]
15 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 15th, 2009 @ 07:22:33 pm, using 724 words, 23 views
Old, not very funny joke about our criminal justice system. It’s not a system, there’s no justice, and that’s criminal. Bada bing.
Well, okay, I warned you. It’s not funny because it’s too true. It is inconceivable that, were we to start from scratch, you know, real life “Lost” or something, we would dream up the nightmare of process we have for criminal proceedings today. Certainly the Forefathers would have thought twice about those Amendment things had they known that the two “sides” in the pursuit of truth and justice in contested relations would turn everything into professional wrestling and spew word vomit about how that’s how we protect people and/or liberty to justify their selling out of real justice (and morality). And let’s not get started about all the interests who would lose their careers and well-funded lives if we actually reduced crime the way we could if we weren’t sucked down by all the sunk costs in the current warped and retarded “system.” And you want to go to all the plea and charge and sentence bargaining that dominates 95% of all cases that get sentenced? Tired of this yet?
Don’t be. The book that gets credit for much of our current understanding (and nausea) about how the process really works, Malcolm Feeley’s The Process Is the Punishment, is out in its 30th edition and getting a really nice review at California Correctional Crisis. Here’s a little of what you need to know to get you into the review, then the book itself:
Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, most research on procedural justice in the criminal justice system focused on the Supreme Court. This is still the case, to some extent, in law review articles, which focus on watershed Supreme Court decisions to the exclusion of the courts that handle the bulk of everyday criminal cases. In the late 1960s, this trend started to change. Several classic studies on lower courts, focusing on plea bargaining, charging decisions, and public defense work, were published, challenging traditional notions of what a day in the courtroom “should” look like, and bringing to the forefront commonplace processes and events that the constitutional discourse kept hidden. Some of these included Milton Hewmann’s groundbreaking study of plea bargaining, an underwhelmingly discussed phenomenon in light of its prevalence; David Sudnow’s anatomy of plea bargaining based on stereotypization of cases according to their conformity to ideal types of “normal crimes", and Eisenstein and Jacob’s analysis of felony case disposition. A major contribution to this literature was the classic award-winner The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court, by my teacher, mentor, and friend, Malcolm Feeley.
In the book, Feeley provides an anatomy of the Court of Common Pleas in New Haven, Connecticut, analyzing its workings and processes from an organizational perspective. He comes to a (then) startling conclusion: The vast majority of defendants plead guilty. Virtually everyone foregoes his or her right to a jury trial. Judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, are jaded and overworked. Defense attorneys find themselves engaging in social work, rather than legal work. And, most important, the system generates powerful organizational incentives that push defendants to plead guilty, just so that they can avoid the process itself. Despite the fact that most defendants were not sent to jail, but rather had to pay fines, the process was so byzantine, unfathomable, and unpleasant, that most defendants did everything they could to avoid it. The concern about criminal stigma stemming from conviction was not as significant an incentive to insist on a jury trial; most defendants (disproportionally black and poor back in the 1970s as well) already had criminal records, and it was the daunting court process that they aimed to avoid.
Now, the reviewer doesn’t just give you the overview of the book; he also updates you on what’s happened, good and bad, mostly bad, since publication. It’s almost like getting a law course in a can! For free!! But the major point is that the book not only shined a light, the light still glows after 30 years. I know you may not be all that interested in something that’s not all that amusing, but at least go check out the review. You’ll know more and be better prepared for that day, if it comes, when you go through the process yourself.
14 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
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Published on April 14th, 2009 @ 08:32:22 pm, using 421 words, 79 views
It’s easy to miss in all the vital news about pirates and bank “profits” and Jessica Simpson that the big event of your life if you make it another half dozen years or so will be the recognition that we’ve passed the point of no return on climate change and global warming. As some old wise man once said, those with eyes and ears can already see and hear, though, even if most seem to think there’s some quick switch that will be flicked (or not) at our choice. In fact, for some, the equivalent of a slo-mo switch is already extremely clear as winter turns to spring weeks before it used to and all the animals, plants, etc., that accompany that are already changing.
Which is the point of this interesting-sounding book, Early Spring by Amy Seidl, reviewed over at Real Climate. That particular blog is one of the very best places to go for reliable info on weather and all it entails for the future, and this review is superior. Here are a couple of excerpts of a much longer piece that you are cheating yourself if you ignore:
The brilliant title of Seidl’s book was one of the reasons that it caught my attention. The other was that I have realized I need to better educate myself about the impact of climate change on everyday life. I’ve been dismissive of the idea that the average person can really detect the impacts of recent warming on, for example, the timing of the apple-blossom season, but I’ve been taken to task by several of RealClimate’s readers for this. If you are paying attention, they have argued, the changes are actually rather obvious.
—————————-
Maple seedlings need about 100 days of below-freezing weather. As this becomes rarer, fewer maples will populate the forests. This, Seidl explains, is why species-range models predict the decline and eventual loss of sugar maple (at least in New England) in the future. But, she notes, the models don’t take into account the full complexity of the system, such as the impact of competition among different species. So we don’t really know what will happen, or how fast. What we do know is that maple-sugar farmers have noticed – and documented – an earlier maple sugaring season over the last few decades.
And if you need more proof, run over to Brave New Climate and catch up on the way mosquitos are moving with the warming in Australia, and potentially everywhere. Good thing they’re harmless.
13 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 13th, 2009 @ 07:54:05 pm, using 164 words, 26 views
We’ve mentioned before our love here and here for infomercials. Turns out someone loves them more than we (that is, I) do. Or at least is willing to write up a book on them, reviewed here. Complete with some of the secrets of the trade, which, if you haven’t figured out after watching, like, the third one, you should get you some ginzu knives. You can get down with Ron Popeil, learn that the author has bought more than his share of these losers, find out about those Guthy and that Rinker guys, and hear about 30% of Americans who actually ordered stuff from these guys last year. (Although the frat boys and basement characters who order “Girls Gone Wild” are probably better left unknown.)
The infomercial is an art form that we in America have laid claim to. Which explains a lot, including Madoff. We ignore it at our own risk. Excuse me now. They’re showing the “Magic Bullet” and it looks really good.
08 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 8th, 2009 @ 07:04:51 pm, using 568 words, 27 views
One of the major reasons we’ve allowed our fears and soap operas to empty our public treasuries on prisons when they are among the worst ways to protect the public and potential victims that we have for most offenders and offenses is because we let demagogues and self-obsessed victims define all lawbreakers as demons and Dahmers. Some are, but most aren’t, and even those whom we may believe are, aren’t always. There have been some real changes among the folks we put behind bars, but we refuse to abide Jesus’ admonition to forgive when the penitance is real and to care for the prisoners. (He’s just so inconvenient for people wanting to show who really has God’s eye.) But then no local news/horror show could keep its ratings up if it talked about bad guys who aren’t, could it?, and what would CSI and Law & Order do????
But somehow every now and then something breaks through the BS about our criminal “justice” “system” and we get a picture of what is and could be. It sounds like we’re having one of those moments now. Thomas Cahill, best known for some interesting (and short) history books on themes like how the Irish saved the universe, which is how I read it anyway, has decided to put the time in on a moving story about a guy on death row who turned his life around and those of everyone else he knew . . . before Texas decided that such a person was best off dead. The result is A Saint on Death Row, reviewed here, and with an excerpt of that review below:
Green died for his role in a robbery at a convenience store that resulted in a shooting and a man’s death. A white youth in the group of teens was not charged, and a jury without any black members convicted Green, although someone else’s fingerprints were on the gun. The victim’s family believed in his innocence and opposed the execution.
Cahill’s moving tale shines a sharp light on a negligent and flawed justice system, and on a state that uses the death penalty far beyond any other. Texas has executed at least 425 people since the penalty was reinstated in 1976, while the next highest state, Virgina, has executed 102.
Yet Green’s story is also a stand-in for thousands, perhaps millions, of other American youths who get into trouble because they were raised in poor and abusive environments, and whose potential is often snuffed out.
Hopefully some movie producer will get on this if we turn it into a bestseller. And please don’t tell me how I don’t sympathize with victims. Timothy McVeigh blew me up and the bloody woman I helped carry out of our building. A good friend and her children were murdered so notoriously that 10 years later I got to watch a made-for-tv movie about it to live it again. A two-part made-for-tv movie. I support a death penalty that would be carried out seriously (without crowds shouting for blood) and without flaw in the investigation and findings. But the world’s not black and white and we were given strict instructions to forgive and welcome back when someone changed his/her life the right way. The world’s down at least one such changed person thanks to Texas. We need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This book gives us a chance.
07 April 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on April 7th, 2009 @ 07:22:12 pm, using 332 words, 26 views
One of the more clever marketing turns I’ve seen lately is the cover of Why We Make Mistakes by Joe Hallinan. That is, the off-angle cover that you just about laugh at because somebody made a mis . . . oh, I get it. I’ve already started thinking how they’ll pull this off with the paperback. My bet is a double cover with the top one off like the hardback cover. What’s that? You really don’t care? And, no, I don’t have a life.
Anyway, Neuronarrative has an interview up with Hallinan that gives details and reasons for the book. Here’s a brief taste to get you over to the whole meal:
When we make a mistake, there’s usually less than even odds that we’ll own up to it. Why do you think we’re so self conscious and defensive about something we’re all absolutely prone to do?
In a lot of circumstances, admitting a mistake can be a career death sentence. To admit you erred is to show your jugular to your enemies. So people don’t do it.
On a more personal basis, owning up to an error may require us to admit some unpleasant truths to ourselves. For instance, if we sign up for a gym membership that we end up not using, it’s easy to come up with excuses for why we didn’t exercise as often as we thought we would: we can blame the kids, or say there was some project at work that came up.
It’s much harder to admit that we really are the undisciplined, lazy person our old ex-boyfriend/girlfriend said we were - because if they were right about that, they might have been right about other things, and that would mean even more years in therapy! I’m joking a bit, but you get the point: admitting the root cause of a mistake can be painful, so most people avoid the pain.
Run on over and check it out, okay?
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