tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-104226702024-03-08T10:04:58.763-07:00Michael Prescott's BlogOccasional thoughts by suspense novelist Michael PrescottMichael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1112998924261306092005-04-08T15:19:00.000-07:002005-04-08T15:22:04.263-07:00Switching to a new blog siteThis hosting service, Blogger, has been so unreliable and frustrating that I have switched to a different service, TypePad. I'm hoping it will be better. Hard to see how it could be worse ...<br /><br />My <strong><em>new blog site</em></strong> is <a href="http://www.michaelprescott.typepad.com">www.michaelprescott.typepad.com </a>.<br /><br />I hope to see you there!Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1112736964621440572005-04-05T14:36:00.000-07:002005-04-05T18:03:53.353-07:00The Soul of the AgeI recently read an <a href="http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/513/513322p1.html">announcement </a>of a possible film on the life of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Why is this of interest? Well, de Vere is today's most popular candidate for the role of the "real" Shakespeare - the nobleman who wrote the plays attributed to the man from Stratford. And the proposed movie, <em>The Soul of the Age</em>, dramatizes this theory by showing de Vere as the behind-the-scenes mastermind of the Bard's masterpieces. <br /><br />As I discussed in an earlier post, there are pluses and minuses to the "anti-Stratfordian" position - the contention that someone other than Will Shakespeare wrote the works. I am an agnostic on the subject, leaning slightly toward the heretics but by no means committed. One thing I am sure of, however, is that de Vere's life offers plenty of material for an exciting drama. And there are enough parallels between his biography and the life of Hamlet (among other Shakespearean characters) to make the film version intriguing, at the very least.<br /><br />Of course, all this may be premature. The film's would-be director, Roland Emmerich, has not secured funding yet. And he seems to have two or three other irons on the fire, including a movie about King Tut. Whether or not <em>The Soul of the Age </em>actually makes it to the screen remains to be determined. The script was written in 1998 and shelved when <em>Shakespeare in Love </em>went into production. Will it have better luck this time?<br /><br />I hope so. Valid or invalid, the Oxfordian theory is so clever and so intriguing that it deserves to reach a wider audience.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1112655416156737122005-04-04T15:45:00.000-07:002005-04-04T16:08:19.550-07:00More on God and Albert EllisMy previous post discussed rational-emotive psychological theorist Albert Ellis and his strange reluctance to pass judgment on anybody - even Adolf Hitler! <br /><br />I tossed out the speculation that perhaps Ellis, an ardent atheist, was worried by the prospect of being judged himself, either by others or by God. <br /><br />Since then I've reflected a little more on the issue, and I think there may be a better explanation of Ellis's thinking. Possibly he believes that if we define a person as bad or evil, then we are saying that this person is irredeemable - that he can <em>never </em>be anything but bad or evil. So in calling him a bad person, we are denying his humanity by foreclosing any possibility of atonement and redemption.<br /><br />This interpretation would seem to be more in line with Ellis's comments. If this is his view, however, it is still much mistaken. Calling someone a bad person in no way logically entails saying that he cannot be redeemed. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the Christian tradition, a person <em>must </em>declare himself to be a sinner <em>before </em>he can begin to atone for his sins and seek redemption. Being a sinner is not the end of the matter, but only the beginning.<br /><br />The same idea is at work in the twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous, which has proven highly effective. A member of the program must declare himself to be an alcoholic - not "a person who exhibits alcoholic behavior," mind you, but <em>an alcoholic</em>. Only be confronting this fact about himself can the person then move on to overcome his addiction, with the help of a "higher power" (another part of the program). <br /><br />Ellis would presumably object to both steps - the statement "I am an alcoholic" and the trust in a higher power. Yet the AA program gets results, and these steps are integral to it. In fact, when some AA branches removed the "higher power" step in an effort to qualify for government funding (which was not offered to religious programs), they found that the resulting eleven-step program did not work. They had to restore the "higher power" step, even though it meant giving up any hope of government support. <br /><br />This leads us to another criticism of Ellis's position. Throughout his book, he writes as though religion is adopted by weak-minded people who are drawn to it by their neuroses - neuroses which are then exacerbated by the religious belief system itself. If his view were correct, religious people would be more neurotic and more unhappy than the secular population. <br /><br />But subsequent studies (not available at the time Ellis wrote his book) have shown the opposite. People who say that religion is important in their lives are, as a group, happier and better adjusted emotionally than their secular counterparts. Moreover, they are less likely to suffer from substance abuse or other addictions, and more likely to be in good health for their age. Religious practices like prayer and meditation have been shown to be especially effective in maintaining a positive outlook and the ability to deal with stress.(These studies, which are pretty well known, are discussed in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0761519645/qid=1112655879/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books">Patrick Glynn's <em>God: The Evidence</em>, </a>among many other books.) <br /><br />So Ellis appears to have gotten things exactly backward. Religion (unless it degenerates into fanaticism) actually <em>promotes </em>happiness and good mental and physical health. And the ability to say "I am a bad person," far from cheating us of any hope at self-improvement, turns out to be the first necessary step on the road to self-improvement - just as all those religious texts and traditions always said. <br /><br />Gee. How about that?Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1112472948018922882005-04-02T13:03:00.000-07:002005-04-03T00:48:59.403-07:00God and Albert EllisRecently I tracked down the long out-of-print book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0006BV6Y2/qid=1112472244/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books">Is Objectivism a Religion?</a></em> by Albert Ellis. Published in 1968, the book criticizes Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational egoism, dubbed Objectivism, arguing that the philosophy encourages neurosis by making unrealistic demands on its adherents.<br /><br />Ellis, the founder of a school of cognitive psychology called rational-emotive therapy or RET, is concerned that his views may he mistaken for those of Objectivist therapists. He therefore wants to draw a clear dividing line between the two approaches. He also wants to get in the last word after having publicly debated Nathaniel Branden (at the time the leading theorist of Objectivist psychology, although he was soon to be booted out of the movement). As Ellis tells it, the debate became something of a free-for-all, with obnoxious Objectivists in the audience booing and hissing his comments and making it difficult for him to speak.<br /><br />Although he occasionally seems to misunderstand Rand's views on particular topics, Ellis makes a number of cogent points about Objectivism's essential unreality and perfectionism. But what I found more interesting - and more troubling - was his exposition of his own viewpoint. Ellis has a positive horror of passing moral judgment on other people. He regards a propensity for judging others as a sign of neurosis. He thinks there is no such thing as a bad person, only bad behavior. For him this is not a platitude but a profound and compelling truth. He goes so far as to say that even Adolf Hitler must not be judged as evil. Indeed, <em>Is Objectivism a Religion?</em> ends with a ringing peroration on the ''bigotry" implied in morally condemning Hitler.<br /><br /><blockquote>... although Hitler was a <em>person who</em> committed abominable deeds, it is unscientific and misleading to call him an <em>abominable person</em>. And just as Hitler himself was bigoted – because he called a person who has non-Aryan heredity a non-Aryan person, and then condemned this whole person because he happened to dislike his non-Aryan background – so Nathaniel Branden is a person with bigoted ideas if he labels Hitler as "an unqualifiedly contemptible human being" instead of a human being with many contemptible traits. The mere fact that Hitler's crimes included many murders of innocent people does not gainsay the fact that he was a <em>person who</em> did wrong things, rather than, as Branden implies, a werewolf or a devil.<br /><br />The main point is that there <em>are</em> no humans who are vermin, werewolves, or devils. There are just humans who are human; and who, being human, often do the damnedest deeds. To accept this fact is to be scientific, humane, and irreligious. To refuse to accept it is to be unscientific, inhumane and religious. (p. 308; excerpt from the final paragraphs of the book)<br /></blockquote><br />This viewpoint strikes me as simply bizarre. I'm willing to concede that one should not condemn another person as evil on the basis of a single, isolated act - unless the act in question is especially heinous and calculated. (And Objectivism is all too willing to condemn people willy-nilly, not only on the basis of a single act but even on the basis of a single statement, single thought, or single emotional reaction.) In combating such knee-jerk moralism, Ellis is on solid ground.<br /><br />But when a person commits a <em>series</em> of evil acts over a long period of time - when his character and his life are <em>centered</em> on evil acts - then it becomes absurd to say that his <em>behavior</em> is evil but <em>he</em> is not. It is a distinction without a difference.<br /><br />Suppose someone performs countless acts of kindness throughout his lifetime. Would we hesitate to call him kind? Or if he performs numerous acts of bravery, doesn't he quality as brave?<br /><br />Ellis might object that no one is brave - or kind, or evil - <em>all</em> the time. This is true. But surely we judge a person not by his incidental acts but by his typical or characteristic behavior. Adolf Hitler no doubt had moments of kindness and humanity (he is said to have loved his dogs), but these acts don't mitigate the essential malignity of his record, a record of premeditated mass murder and war and terror, extending over decades.<br /><br />I find Ellis's view too eccentric to justify a more detailed rebuttal, but it may be worthwhile to ask what motivates him to take such an untenable position – and not only to take it, but to defend it vehemently and make it a centerpiece of his argument, thereby weakening his entire book.<br /><br />The answer seems to lie in Ellis's furious, sustained, almost pathological hatred of religion. It apparently doesn’t occur to him that his zeal on this subject is itself "religious" in the worst sense of the term.<br /><br />For Ellis, all religion is mere ''supernatural nonsense," all the varieties of God merely "invented" by human beings who are motivated by a sense of their own "worthlessness." Potshots at religion litter the book's pages, indicating an abiding contempt for all things religious, a contempt that borders on the obsessive. Indeed, "religion" may be the most pejorative term in Ellis's vocabulary, as the very title of his book makes plain. And perhaps predictably, most of his rhetorical firepower is directed at ''Judeo-Christian religion," his bete noir.<br /><br />Apparently what Ellis despises most about religion is its moralistic quality - all this talk of good and evil, of sin, of guilt. He would do away with all that. His conception of humanism requires him to hold that every human being has value, and therefore no human being can be written off as fundamentally bad. To make such a judgment is to abandon humanism and enter the realm of religion – i.e., to abandon reason and become an abject irrationalist.<br /><br />But clearly it is possible to hold that all human life has value, and <em>therefore</em> to condemn someone like Hitler, who went out of his way to spoil and destroy human life. Indeed, if we do value the lives of individual human beings, then we can hardly place much value on the life of a mass murderer, who has extinguished so many lives.<br /><br />This objection is so obvious that it's hard to see how Ellis could overlook it. Perhaps the answer is that valuing human life is not, after all, the root of his position. I suspect that Ellis's actual motive is somewhat different from the motive he ascribes to himself. It's not that judging others is such an awful prospect. The awful prospect is that of being judged oneself.<br /><br />In his description of his debate with Branden, Ellis claims that the harsh reaction of the largely pro-Objectivist audience did not discomfit him in the least. "As I teach my RET patients, human beings only become 'insulted' when they take seriously the barbs of others, and essentially agree with these others that, yes, they (the 'insulted' ones) are somewhat worthless individuals. [A rational person who was the target of such barbs] would surely not take [the] accusations very seriously ... and would listen to the rest of [the] accusations with equanimity." (p. 289)<br /><br />Like Queen Gertrude, Ellis protests too much. In reality, being condemned and criticized is surely going to ruffle most people's feathers, no matter how much cognitive therapy they may have had. Yes, a person of high self-regard may be less easily flustered by criticism, but the idea that anyone can listen to insults and condemnations "with equanimity" is just as unrealistic and perfectionistic as the Objectivist doctrines that Ellis decries.<br /><br />Only a person with a strong fear of criticism would work so hard to prove that criticism can't possibly bother him. Only someone intensely worried about being judged would rail so vehemently against the very idea of judgment.<br /><br />Opponents of religion often argue that religionists believe in God merely because it makes them feel good and allays their fears. But the argument can be turned around. Some of those same anti-religionists may hold their position because to believe in God would make them feel <em>bad</em>. It would, perhaps, scare the hell out of them. Atheism may in fact be their way of feeling good and allaying their fears.<br /><br />After all, it's bad enough to be judged by one's fellow human beings. How much worse is it to be judged by some ultimate and implacable Authority?Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1111953168995182322005-03-27T12:40:00.000-07:002005-03-27T13:21:09.076-07:00Shakespeare: who was he?I have a certain fascination with the much-debated Shakespeare authorship question, as demonstrated by the three essays I've posted on the topic (which can be found <a href="http://michaelprescott.net/essays.htm">here</a>). Now a new book has entered the fray, an attractively produced volume titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060775599/qid=1111952344/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books"><em>Players : The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare</em></a>, by Bertram Fields.<br /><br />In a nutshell, the authorship controversy centers on whether William Shakespeare, a not-very-well-educated lad from a small farming town, could have acquired the range of knowledge, the life experience, and the massive vocabulary (21,000 words, almost three times the vocabulary of John Milton) that are evident in the plays and poems published in his name. Stratfordians - i.e., those who insist that Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the works, say that Shakespeare's innate genius allowed him to overcome all obstacles. The doubters, clumsily dubbed anti-Stratfordians, say that even genius is not a sufficient explanation for the playwright's apparent familiarity with Greek, Italian, and French, with European locales, with high-flown metaphysical speculations, with legalisms, with military and nautical terminology, with aristocratic pursuits like falconry (forbidden to the middle class), and with the intricacies of life at court. They also see in Shakespeare a distinct preference for the upper classes (nearly all of his major characters are nobles or royals) and a disdain for commoners, who are typically depicted as comical louts or dangerous mobs.<br /><br />Bertram Fields revisits all these issues and more in his readable, user-friendly volume. The great virtue of his book is its evenhandedness. Fields carefully presents both sides of all the major arguments, never sliding into dogmatism or insisting he has all the answers. This approach may frustrate the absolutists on both sides of the debate, but it allows for an intelligent assessment of the claims and counterclaims, without emotion or invective.<br /><br />In a book that covers such a large subject, there are bound to be some lapses. Fields makes a few mistakes; for instance, he says in passing that Shakespeare's four major tragedies - <em>Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, </em>and <em>Othello</em> - did not appear in print until the First Folio of 1623. Actually, three of the four were published in earlier quartos (the exception is <em>Macbeth</em>). He says that the Earl of Oxford's arms depicted "a rampant lion shaking a spear," when it would be more accurate and less tendentious to say that the lion is holding a broken spear. (Did the lion break the spear by shaking it too hard? Oxfordians - those who think the earl was the real Shakespeare - like to think so.) He also quotes Gabriel Harvey's tribute to Oxford, "... thy countenance shakes a spear," without mentioning that the tribute was written in Latin and the words can be translated in other ways.<br /><br />These are minor points. What bothered me more was the paucity of citations to other scholars. The book has only three or four footnotes, no endnotes, and most surprising of all, no bibliography. Fields owes most of his arguments to earlier writers, but they are only intermittently acknowledged. His analyses of both <em>Henry V</em> and <em>The Merchant of Venice</em> seemingly owe much to Harold Goddard's superb commentary <em>The Meaning of Shakespeare</em>, but Goddard is never mentioned. He gives little or no indication of the sources for his information on Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Derby, among others. More citations would have been helpful to readers who wish to pursue this subject further, and would have been appropriate in giving credit where it is due. (For those who are interested, my essays - linked above - do provide a list of sources, including Web sites.)<br /><br />These caveats should not detract from the overall value of <em>Players</em>. Fields has done a commendable job of summarizing a vast amount of information in a clear, straightforward way, and exhibits a level of common sense often absent from this contentious dispute. His own theory, put forward tentatively at the end, is not terribly convincing (at least to me), but he does not demand allegiance to it. It's just one possibility among many.<br /><br />In the end, what Fields's book and others like it demonstrate is that the case for "the Stratford man" is relatively weak, and that other contenders can and should be taken seriously. At the same time, they also demonstrate that no single contender fits the bill. Oxford died too early, and the poetry that survives under his own name is not of Shakespearean quality. Marlowe can be a candidate only if he faked his own death in 1593 - not an impossibility, but surely an obstacle to plausibility. The Earl of Derby left no writing in his own name, giving us no way to judge his talents as an author. Francis Bacon had a worldview radically different from Shakespeare's, and his multifaceted career kept him busy enough without penning 37 or more plays on the side. Other proposed candidates are even more unsatisfactory.<br /><br />The riddle may never be solved. The great value of <em>Players : The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare</em> is that the book is content to raise the questions and leave them, ultimately, unresolved. Sometimes the most honest answer is none at all.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1111469864544801372005-03-21T22:30:00.000-07:002005-03-21T23:11:46.386-07:00Was Ayn Rand evil?Years ago I was involved in Objectivism, the movement that grew out of the writings of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. In an essay called <a href="http://michaelprescott.net/shrugging.htm">"Shrugging Off Ayn Rand," </a>I discussed how the philosophy didn't work for me and why I eventually moved on.<br /><br />Lately, though, I've been looking at Ayn Rand from a different - and even more unflattering - perspective. I just read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/076791581X/qid=1111470634/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books"><em>The Sociopath Next Door</em> by Martha Stout</a>, a nonfiction book that argues that sociopaths of a predominantly nonviolent type are more prevalent than we realize. And, by coincidence (or is it synchronicity?), I happened to look up the out-of-print book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312799128/qid=1111469902/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books"><em>Therapist</em> by Ellen Plasil </a>on Amazon.com . <em>Therapist</em> tells the story of an Objectivist psychotherapist, Lonnie Leonard, who was highly regarded by leaders of Rand's movement in the 1970s - but who was secretly mistreating his female patients, abusing them emotionally and sexually. One of the reader comments on the Amazon page was left by Scott Ryan, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595267335/qid=1111470730/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/102-6555107-7853702"><em>Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality</em></a>. Ryan remarks:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>And the fact that the morally corrupt Leonard was able to pass for so long as "one of them" says something crucially important about the movement's standards and purposes: namely, that it <em>is</em> awfully hard to tell a devout Objectivist from a narcissistic, manipulative sociopath. I wonder why. (Hint: it was hard to tell Rand from one too.) </blockquote>Acerbic though this comment is, it got me thinking. <em>Was</em> Ayn Rand "a narcissistic, manipulative sociopath" - or at least a borderline case?<br /><br />Well, consider the portrait of Rand drawn by two biographies - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0787945137/qid=1111470822/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books">Nathaniel Branden's <em>My Years with Ayn Rand </em></a>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038524388X/ref=pd_bxgy_text_1/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books&st=*">Barbara Branden's <em>The Passion of Ayn Rand </em></a>- and by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812693906/qid=1111470779/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/102-6555107-7853702">Jeff Walker's <em>The Ayn Rand Cult</em></a>. These are, admittedly, hostile sources, but in the absence of any biography by Rand's admirers, they are the only ones we have.<br /><br />Anyone judging by these books would have to say that Rand was narcissistic in the extreme. She lacked empathy. She could be intensely charming (charm and charisma are common features of sociopathy) but was also prone to outbursts of rage and frustration.<br /><br />She exploited young, emotionally vulnerable people and frequently sabotaged their self-image with her vindictive cruelty. She claimed to love her husband but carried on an affair with a younger man right in front of him, a situation that drove her husband to alcoholism.<br /><br />She was a hypochondriac. She showed signs of paranoia. She had an addictive personality, smoked two packs of cigarettes daily, and gobbled handfuls of diet pills (amphetamines).<br /><br />She despised "average" people, whom she regarded as ugly and stupid and irrational, while viewing herself in exalted terms as the greatest writer in history and the greatest philosopher since Aristotle.<br /><br />She was concerned with no one's needs or wants or suffering except her own. She was able to claim in print that no one had ever helped her, when in fact she had benefited for years from the charity and goodwill of relatives and business associates and friends. She alienated nearly all her friends and allies by the end of her life, and died nearly alone.<br /><br />She literally drove people crazy; ex-Objectivist Edith Efron once remarked that if you spent any time with Rand, you had to ask yourself if you were insane, or if she was (quoted in Walker). She was a megalomaniac. She was probably manic-depressive. She created heroic fictional characters who are deeply repressed, incapable of normal human interaction, and typically angry or disgusted with the world.<br /><br />This is hardly a person who should be seen as the epitome of rationality and benevolence - yet this is how her followers <em>do</em> see her. In my Objectivist years I once hesitantly suggested to a fellow Objectivist that there might be a few character flaws to be found in Rand, only to be met with a blank stare and the appalled question, "Character flaws - <em>in Ayn Rand</em>?!" In Objectivist dogma it is always <em>other people</em> who were at fault in their dealings with "Miss Rand" (as they like to call her). Somehow it was always those irrational others who abused, deceived, and hurt Ayn Rand, and her rages and bitterness were entirely justified, entirely rational. How could they not be? Rand was the personification of reason, so by definition whatever she thought, felt, or did just <em>had</em> to be rational - Q.E.D.<br /><br />When I look at the portrait of Ayn Rand drawn by a variety of people who knew her best, I see a person who is certainly larger and more theatrical than the run-of-the-mill sociopaths in Martha Stout's book, different from them in degree - but not very different in kind.<br /><br />And I wonder how a movement founded by a woman with such serious disorders could ever have been seen as a way to personal happiness or to a better world.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1110692032455009442005-03-12T21:53:00.000-07:002005-03-13T15:26:49.093-07:00EvilI just finished reading <em>The History of Torture</em>, by Daniel P. Mannix, and I have to say the book's relentless chronicling of man's inhumanity to man was pretty depressing. I had liked to think that we are making moral progress, but Mannix's book made me wonder if I was wrong, and if my optimism abour humanity was misplaced. I ended up writing some notes to myself, in which I came to some sort of understanding of the perennial problem of human cruelty. Rather than tidy up these notes, I'm going to reproduce them with only minor editing and abridgments. Maybe some of you have gone through the same thought process and will recognize yourselves here. <br /><br />Here's what I jotted down:<br /><br />The thing that haunts me is the fact of human evil. The use of torture, the cruelty, the demonic aspect of people - what is it, if not Original Sin? And yet I don't believe in Original Sin. I like to believe in moral progress. But if someone held the Roman "games" today, wouldn't people show up? They enjoy the emotional pain and humiliation of reality-TV shows, even the surgical disfigurement of <em>The Swan</em> (a show in which contestants are put through plastic surgery). They attend cockfights, dogfights, bullfights, boxing matches, car races that end in deadly crashes. There seems to be something inherent in human nature that responds to blood sport. Maybe we haven't made so much progress, after all. Or perhaps it's better to say that whatever progress we've made is painfully slow, painfully hard won.<br /><br />I used to think this kind of cruelty was an outgrowth of materialistic culture. The Romans, after all, were materialists who believed in nothing but sensual gratification. On the other hand, the Inquisitors believed they were saving souls, and the Aztecs believed they were placating the gods. It's not a simple matter of "materialism bad, spirituality good." It goes deeper. Any belief system is compatible with torture - as if the lust to kill is so deeply ingrained in human beings that it can be rationalized under <em>any </em>system of thought. If so, it's incorrect to "explain" cruelty by reference to ideology or philosophy or culture. Ethics can mitigate cruelty, but the potential for cruelty is always there, and we are all capable of it. <br /><br />We all mistreat people, abuse people, insult people. No one is ever blameless. When I was a big sports fan, I used to root so hard for my team that I actually hoped the opposing players would be injured. <br /><br />And <em>why </em>was I rooting so hard? Because <em>my ego </em>was invested in the team. Their victory was my victory, and their defeat was my defeat - my humilation. <br /><br />The ego is the key. The small-minded, petty, grasping, insecure, defensive part of us that wants to be superior, wants to control others, wants dominance and power and safety. Only by getting beyond the ego can we escape from violence and cruelty.<br /><br />The Roman mob rooted for slaughter because they were powerless and frustrated, and it pleased them to see someone worse off than themselves. The Inquisitors were willing to torture because of their egoistic conceit that they, and only they, were in possession of absolute truth. The Nazis worshipped Hitler, a megalomaniac, the personification of ego. The Aztecs, too, were operating on an ego level - they were terrified of the gods, and to propitiate these deities they engaged in wholesale massacres. (The ego is all about fear and vigilance and saving oneself regardless of the cost to others.)<br /><br />Religious and ethical traditions have always opposed the ego. Greek myths warn of "hubris," or overweening pride, and the myth of Narcissus is a critique of excessive self-love. In the Bible, violence enters the world (Cain's murder of Abel) right after humanity acquires an ego (Adam and Eve's defiance of God). The Ten Commendments stress the need to subordinate the willful self to God, to parents, to social norms. Do not covet = don't be envious or jealous (ego qualities). Do not put any false gods before God = don't elevate the ego to godlike status. <br /><br />The ego is part of human nature and can't be eradicated. The best we can do is keep it in check. Moral systems teach us this truth. If we have made progress since the days of the Roman "games" or the Inquisition, it's only because we have a long ethical tradition that attempts to put some restraints on the ego. <br /><br />So it looks like there really <em>is </em>such a thing as Original Sin - and it's the ego. It's part of us all.<br /><br />***<br /><br />That's the end of my notes, but as a coda, here's a quote that just occurred to me. It's from Shakespeare's <em>Measure for Measure</em>, a play about cruelty and hubris:<br /><br /><blockquote>But man, proud man, <br />Dressed in a little brief authority, <br />Most ignorant of what he's most assured <br />(His glassy essence), like an angry ape <br />Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven <br />As makes the angels weep ...<br /><br /><em>Measure for Measure</em>, II, ii. 122-127 </blockquote>Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1110676036864787682005-03-12T17:52:00.000-07:002005-03-12T18:07:16.866-07:00Big bucksLast night I saw a news report on the federal government's latest budget, which is said to be 2.6 trillion dollars. This got me wondering how I could visualize such a large sum. I decided that by breaking it down into smaller pieces I could make more sense of it. Here are my seat-of-the-pants calculations.<br /><br />The government spends $2.6 trillion in a year. <br />There are 52 weeks in a year.<br />Therefore the government spends $50 billion per week.<br />There are seven days in a week.<br />Therefore the government spends $7.14 billion per day.<br />There are 24 hours in a day.<br />Therefore the government spends $297 million per hour. <br />There are sixty minutes in an hour.<br />Therefore the government spends $4.9 million per minute.<br />There are sixty seconds in a minute.<br />Therefore the government spends $82,600 per second.<br /><br />I should add that the federal budget does not include so-called "off-budget items," which are also very costly. And it does not count state, county, and municipal government spending. <br /><br />I'm not saying that this amount of spending is necessarily excessive. The United States is a military, industrial, and scientific colossus, with a population of 300,000,000, and it is fighting a global war on terrorism while engaging in massive programs that involve economic subsidies, medical research, and the maintenance of infrastructure, to name just a few. <br /><br />But when we hear members of Congress insist that government programs are being starved and shrunken, remember this: <br /><br />The federal government currently spends $82,600 <em>every </em>second of <em>every </em>minute of <em>every </em>hour of <em>every </em>day of <em>every </em>week of the year.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1110517470314061052005-03-10T21:57:00.000-07:002005-03-10T22:04:30.316-07:00Playing with fireA common demonstration of paranormal abilities involves walking on fire or handling fire. The 19th century medium Daniel Dunglas Home was known for his ability to hold red-hot coals in the palms of his hands, astonishing observers who swore that the coals glowed and that Home's hands were unprotected. And of course we all know about demonstrations by shamans of their ability to walk barefoot over embers without injury to the soles of their feet.<br /><br />There may, however, be a non-paranormal explanation. Recently I've been reading a rather grim but interesting book called <em>The History of Torture</em> by Daniel P. Mannix. (This is the same Mannix who wrote the book about the Roman gladiatorial games that I discussed a short while ago.) On pp. 90-91 he describes ordeals by fire, in which a person's guilt or innocence was determined by whether or not he could come into contact with fire and emerge unscathed. Mannix writes:<br /><br /><blockquote>The accused might have to carry a red-hot piece of iron a certain distance, walk over several red-hot plowshares (unsually nine), or dip his hand into a cauldron of boiling water, lead, or oil.... In all such tests, everything depends on whether the accused's body is damp. When the human body is brought into sudden contact with extreme heat, the moisture on the skin turns to steam. A common example of this phenomenon is dropping a drop of water on a hot flatiron. If the iron is not too hot, the water will spread over the surface and evaporate, but if the iron is red-hot, the drop will keep its shape and roll about on the iron. If the drop is tilted off on the hand, it will be found to be quite cool. It never actually touches the iron but is supported by a cushion of vapor. This is known as Leiderfrost's phenomenon.<br /><br />Bechmann in his <em>History of Inventions</em>, Vol. II, page 122, says: "In the month of September 1765 when I visited the copper works at Awested, one of the workmen put his hand under his armpit for a few minutes to make it sweat, as he said, and taking it out again, drew it over a ladle filled with melted copper, some of which he skimmed off."<br /><br />I have seen steelworkers wash their hands in molten steel as it was poured from a crucible and Dr. Mayne Coe of Riviera Beach, Florida, has heated cast iron to a molten state (2,795 degrees) and handled it with moist hands. He has also walked on red-hot plates of sheet metal. As professional fire-eaters know, a white-hot spoon can be touched to the tongue without burning it (provided the tongue is damp) but if the spoon is only red-hot, it will burn. The theory, then, behind all such ordeals is that the guilty person in an agony of fear will have a dry mouth and dry hands, while the innocent who perspires naturally will not be harmed.<br /></blockquote> Mannix was probably in a position to know. The bio on the book's back cover says that after college he "joined a circus, working as a sword-swallower, mind-reader, escapologist and lock-picker." Presumably he knew some fire-eaters and learned the tricks of their trade.<br /><br />Assuming Mannix's account is accurate, it could explain firewalking, handling hot coals, and similar effects often ascribed to paranormal powers.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1110094487140064862005-03-06T00:10:00.000-07:002005-03-18T13:37:05.906-07:00Julian JaynesIn 1976, with considerable fanfare, Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes put out a provocative and fascinating book that purported to explain human consciousness, religion, ancient history, and even some forms of mental illness. This all-encompassing theory was presented under the imposing title <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618057072/102-6555107-7853702"><em>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind</em></a>.<br /><br />The crux of Jaynes's argument is an apparently outrageous claim – that modern consciousness, in the sense of self-awareness, is a historically recent development, dating back only to about 1000 BC, and that earlier civilizations, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and Babylonians, were founded and maintained by people who were essentially "unconscious." That is, they received marching orders from voices in their heads which they took to be the voices of the gods, but which were actually generated by the right hemisphere of the brain. (The division of the mind into two halves, godlike instructor and passive listener, is what Jaynes calls "bicameral.") In a trancelike state that lasted a lifetime, primitive people carried out these instructions, living, marrying, working, and dying in the thrall of the "gods" who ordered and organized every detail of their lives. Later, the left hemisphere became dominant and the gods died out, persisting (in a debased and altered form) only in certain cases of schizophrenia.<br /><br />There is an air of triumphalism about the book – the annunciation of a staggering new truth, blinding in its simplicity and awesome in its implications. One reviewer enthused that <em>Origin</em> "renders whole shelves of books obsolete." The book's lengthy title was clearly chosen to reflect Darwin's <em>Origin of Species</em>, the longer title of which is <em>On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection</em>. Jaynes felt that he had solved the problem of the origin of consciousness as decisively as Darwin had solved the problem of the origin of species.<br /><br />Yet although Jaynes's theory received a great deal of press, it has found relatively few takers. Only a handful of academics have endorsed Jaynes's views, and his ideas today spark little interest. The <a href="http://www.julianjaynes.org/">official Web site</a> of the Julian Jaynes Society features a forum in which members can discuss the book and its implications. When I last looked, a total of only 31 messages had been posted there. <br /><br />(<em>Correction</em>, March 18: A reader pointed out to me that the forum was newly created when I looked at it, so the small number of messages does <em>not </em>indicate a lack of interest in Jaynes. I take the point and stand corrected. However, I would still maintain that the academic community has shown little willingess to embarce Jaynes's ideas. This <em>could </em>be due to the inertia and closed-mindedness of the establishment, but below I argue that there are other explanations.) <br /><br />There are several reasons for the widespread indifference to such challenging ideas. First, Jaynes's theory is inherently difficult to accept. An entire civilization comprised of people who are unconscious is simply too far removed from our normal way of understanding the world. To support such an idea, Jaynes has to regard consciousness as nonessential to human life – as a mere ability to "narratize" behavior we would have performed anyway. He goes to great lengths to convince us that consciousness is unnecessary for most human activities, pointing out, for instance, that we can drive a car without paying conscious attention to the task. But surely we need to be conscious when we <em>learn</em> how to drive a car; only after this skill has been habituated can we afford to drive on "autopilot," and even then we need to be able to snap back into full alertness in an emergency. The idea that such vast engineering projects as the ziggurats and pyramids could be carried out unconsciously is anti-intuitive in the extreme.<br /><br />Second, Jaynes has a disconcerting tendency to quote selectively from his sources. When mining ancient literature for hints of the bicameral mind, he culls examples that buttress his point while ignoring or explaining away countless other examples that work against his position. One example of his tendentiousness is his treatment of Hesiod's <em>Works and Days</em>, a very early Greek poem that consists of instructions on how to manage a farm. Jaynes interprets the poem as having been dictated by the "god" side of the brain; in effect, he argues, <em>Works and Days</em> is a written record of the kind of voice that our ancestors heard incessantly.<br /><br />But the poem itself contains scattered verses indicating a very different origin. The narrator tells us that he and his brother Perses inherited their father's farm, that Perses is shiftless and incompetent, and that having taken Perses to court and lost, the narrator has put together this instruction manual for Perses in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the farm. None of this is consistent with the bicameral mind hypothesis.<br /><br />Jaynes deals with this considerable impediment to his argument by brushing it aside; the sections of the poem containing these references, he says, must be later interpolations. "The protest lodged in the crucial lines 37-39 [was] added later," he writes, providing no evidence. This special pleading is repeated in his treatment of the Iliad, the Bible, and other ancient sources. Where a passage supports (or can be made to support) his theory, he assumes it to be old and authentic. Where a passage does not support his theory, he assumes it to be newer and "modern."<br /><br />Finally, Jaynes falls into the trap that awaits any specialist who ventures outside his area of expertise. As a psychologist with no special training in ancient literature, he seems to misunderstand the ancient sources themselves. A good example of this misunderstanding, and its strange persistence even in the face of a cogent argument to the contrary, is found in a question and answer period in which Jaynes participated, posted <a href="http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/jaynes_discussants.pdf">here </a>as an Adobe Reader document.<br /><br />An audience member trenchantly observes that Biblical references to idols, upon which Jaynes relies quite heavily, may be unreliable.<br /><br /><blockquote>Questioner: ... the biblical Hebrews’ notion that the “idol worshippers’ actually believed that their statues in fact spoke to them seems to have been based on a misconception of what it was these statues did (what purpose they served) in the surrounding cultures. Kaufmann (1960) in commenting on the ancient religion of Israel claims, in fact, that ancient Jews were so far removed from idolatry that they no longer understood what it was that the idol-makers believed in. Kaufmann says of the Jews that their view of idolatry was laughably simplistic. The ancient Jews thought erroneously that idolaters, in fact, believed that their icons would speak to them, something which I think you, Dr. Jaynes, believe as well. Kaufmann, however, asserts that in idolatrous societies, the icons behaved more in the way that ... a picture of the Pope or an icon of Jesus behaves to a believing Catholic. These icons were simply icons that represented a deity, not real gods themselves that anyone in those idolatrous societies actually spoke to....<br /><br />Jaynes: If I could first reply to that. Indeed, such statues are definitely called gods in the Hebrew bible.<br /><br />Questioner: That’s right, but erroneously!<br /><br />Jaynes: I am not making judgments.</blockquote><br /><br />Here, Jaynes simply fails to understand the point of the question. It is not an issue of "making judgments," but of grasping the context in which the Biblical passages were written. Jaynes makes much of Biblical writings that depict pagans worshipping their idols as literal gods, but if these writings themselves are inaccurate, and if pagan idolatry was in fact much more sophisticated, then Jaynes's arguments are fundamentally flawed. Jaynes continues:<br /><br /><blockquote>Jaynes: I am just looking at the whole series. Nor am I just looking at the Jews. The evidence for idols, a truer term than icons, during the time period of the Hebrew Testament is considerable. Else why would so many of the prophets inveigh against them?</blockquote><br /><br />Again, Jaynes is failing to grasp the point. No one disputes that Hebrew prophets inveighed against idols. The question is whether the prophets <em>correctly understood the nature of pagan idolatry</em>.<br /><br /><blockquote>Jaynes: Idols are particularly evident in the early books, from the <em>elohim</em> or gods that Laban accuses Jacob of stealing (Genesis 31:30) to centuries later when the Philistines after defeating Saul run and tell their <em>atsabim</em>, their idols, before they tell their people (I Samuel 31:9; I Chronicles 10:9).<br /></blockquote><br />To repeat the point: no one disputes the fact that idols make frequent appearances in the Hebrew Bible. But whether the cultures of idol-worshipping nations were properly understood by the writers of the Bible is a separate issue. Moreover, the parallel passages from I Samuel and I Chronicles don't necessarily support Jaynes' point. I Samuel 31:9 reads, "[they] sent [the weapons of their defeated enemy Saul] throughout the land of the Philistines to carry the good news to the house of their idols and to the people." (NASB) There is nothing here to indicate that they "run and tell their ... idols, <em>before </em>they tell their people." Since the house of their idols, i.e., their temple, was obviously a center of their community, taking the weapons there would be a way of proclaiming the victory to the populace. Indeed, the very next verse reads, "They put his weapons in the temple of Ashtaroth ..." <br /><br /><blockquote>Jaynes: To call such god-idols merely icons like pictures of the Pope is a serious misreading of the texts and contradicted in many passages (see, for example, I Chronicles l6:26).<br /></blockquote><br />Here, wrapping up his answer, Jaynes merely asserts that any view of idols that is different from his own is a "misreading." He offers no evidence of this claim other than yet another Biblical reference. The cited passage reads in part, "For all the gods of the peoples are idols" – which reiterates the common view among Hebrews of this period that pagans worshipped their idols as gods. But the accuracy of the Hebrews' understanding of pagan customs <em>is the very point in contention</em>. (An alternate translation, mentioned in the NASB's notes, is "For all the gods of the peoples are nonexistent things," which omits any reference to idols.)<br /><br />Jaynes's inability or unwillingness to properly address the question, or even to understand it, suggests to me that he suffered from a condition sometimes described as "theory blindness." Having constructed a comprehensive theory by which to view the world, he was simply unable to think his way out of that mental box.<br /><br />Though Jaynes continued to promote his theory for the rest of his life, his promised sequel to <em>The Origin of Consciousness</em> never materialized. He died in 1997, leaving it to other academics to continue his work. Few have taken up the challenge. Today discussions of Jaynes's book are found mainly on New Age Web sites, mixed in with references to the pseudoscientific writings of Velikovsky and Von Daniken.<br /><br />For myself, I have come to think that <em>The Origin of Consciousness</em> gets history exactly backward. In Jaynes's materialist worldview (in which consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of matter), there can be no such things as gods and spirits or any other paranormal phenomena. Thus the universal acceptance of such things in ancient (and modern) cultures is a puzzle requiring some explanation. The bicameral mind is his answer to the problem; the gods and spirits are simply a more primitive part of the brain.<br /><br />But suppose there actually <em>are</em> paranormal or supernatural phenomena. Suppose there <em>are</em> spirits and what we might call gods - or God. Then the universality of such beliefs does not require complicated rationalistic explanations. If anything, it is the <em>absence</em> of such beliefs among the intelligentsia of the Western world today that raises questions. Rather than hunting for the gods in some forgotten corner of our nervous system, we might do better to seek out truths that "primitive" peoples knew – and which we have forgotten.<br /><br />Near the end of his book, Jaynes laments misguided modern efforts to recapture the gods through mysticism, religion, poetry, and even science – "attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses ..."<br /><br />But what if the Muses did exist, and still do - and we have simply stopped listening?<br /><br /><em>Note</em>: This post was slightly revised and expanded on March 11, '05.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1109960204034604092005-03-04T11:16:00.000-07:002005-03-05T14:23:18.830-07:00The end of books?Not long ago I discussed problems in the paperback end of the book business that may spell "the end of paperbacks," or at least a serious reduction in the number of titles printed in that format. My main source of info was super-agent Richard Curtis, who wrote an article on that subject, published online at <a href="http://www.bksp.org ">Backspace </a>. Now the same Web site has <a href="http://www.bksp.org/RichardCurtis3.html">a new article </a>by Curtis, predicting that electronic media will profoundly change the nature of books. <br /><br />This time, however, I'm skeptical. I've heard this song before. In the late 1980s there was a lot of excited talk about how novels would be rendered obsolete by video games. Video games were so much more dynamic than text; they could put you right inside the action; they had color and sound and animation. How could old-fashioned books compete? But books are still around, and they show no signs of morphing into video games anytime soon.<br /><br />Then in the early '90s the e-book was introduced. I was a small player in this development; my novel <em>Stealing Faces </em>was the first book ever published in e-book form prior to its print publication date. For a while it was the number-one-selling e-book in the country. But number one didn't mean much; the book sold only a few hundred copies in electronic form, compared with more than 100,000 copies in its printed version. And sales of e-books have not risen significantly in the years since. Meanwhile <em>all </em>of the dedicated e-book reading devices, such as the RocketBook, have disappeared from the marketplace. <br /><br />It turns out that readers are conservative types. They are resistant to major changes in either the content or form of the books they buy. And I suspect they will resist the electronic revolution that Curtis foresees. <br /><br />Curtis pins his hopes for the e-revolution on blogs, noting that blogs have become influential very quickly and that it's possible to make money off a blog by running ads on it. But there is less to this story than meets the eye. Of the tens of thousands of blogs that exist (with thousands more being started every day), only a handful have any real following. And even the most successful blogs don't seem to make much money from advertising. Two of the most-read blogs, National Review's <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp">The Corner</a> and <a href="http://www.andrewsullivan.com">Andrew Sullivan's blog</a>, have repeatedly held "pledge drives" in PBS fashion, pleading with readers to donate money to keep the blogs going. Many others have no doubt done the same. It's hard to argue that blogs are wildly profitable when even the most popular ones have to beg for alms. <br /><br />I think the truth is that blogs are simply another niche in an expanding communications universe that will still include traditional books. People don't want to spend all their time staring at a computer screen, no matter how nicely it is packaged. There is something relaxing about a traditional printed book, something comfortable and homey. Years ago, a book called <em>Megatrends </em>observed that as society grows more high-tech, it also grows more "high-touch" - consumers, weary of being surrounded by mass-produced items, seek out handmade furnishings, original art, and other old-fashioned purchases. <br /><br />Curtis includes one troubling example in his essay: <br /><br /><blockquote>Hyper-exposed to audial and visual media, the new breed of publishing animal seems to exhibit diminished confidence in the power of words alone to stimulate the imagination. For many jittery young people, printed texts on a stack of paper are, as one editor said, “kind of boring.” “If all it is, is a book, merely words” he elaborated, “it’s hard to get excited. I ask myself, ‘What else is it besides a book? Is it a video game? A movie? A web site?’ It’s got to be more than a book to turn me on.”</blockquote><br />Now, I realize I run the risk of being seen as hopelessly retro, but in my opinion, anyone who finds "printed texts on a stack of paper" to be "kind of boring," and says it's "hard to get excited" about "a book, merely words," is someone who should <em>not </em>be working as an editor. No doubt there are many exciting opportunities open to this anonymous young (I presume he is young) gentleman, offering him many chances to be creative and clever, but the field of publishing is not among them. <br /><br />For better or worse, the book business is all about words - "merely words." Odds are, it will stay that way for a very long time.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1109790849371679282005-03-02T11:57:00.000-07:002005-03-02T12:14:53.790-07:00A little knowledge ...... can be a dangerous thing. I am certainly aware of this maxim, since on many subjects I have only a <em>very </em>little knowledge, yet I persist in having opinions about them which may or may not be valid. <br /><br />But I'm not the only one. Recently I was reading a book by Deepak Chopra called <em>How To Know God</em> - a bestseller, like all his books - when I came across a fairly common example of a little knowledge that has been inflated into a big (but probably wrong) conclusion. <br /><br />Chopra writes, <br /><br /><blockquote>[Y]ou could never capture [an] electron anyway, since it too breaks down into energy vibrations that wink in and out of existence millions of times per second. Therefore the whole universe is a quantum mirage, winking in and out of existence millions of times per second....<br /><br />You and I exist as flashing photons with a black void in between each flash.... In other words, we are being created, over and over again, all the time. </blockquote><br />I have encountered this image in other books, notably Michael Talbot's <em>The Holographic Universe</em>. Since Chopra has read and often recommends Talbot's book, he may have found this alleged datum of quantum physics there. The trouble is, it's probably not true.<br /><br />The confusion stems from the fact that there are two kinds of subatomic particles - <em>real </em>particles and <em>virtual </em>particles. The virtual particles do wink in and out of existence all the time; they have no stability, and persist only long enough to carry out energy transfers between the real particles.<br /><br />The real particles, on the other hand, do persist over time. They don't wink on and off like the lights on a Christmas tree. Electrons and photons, the two examples Chopra cites, are real particles. When Chopra says that these particles are winking, blinking, or flashing, he is probably just wrong.<br /><br />Why do I say "probably"? Because it is always possible that the real particles are winking also, but at a rate so fast we can't measure it. This option can't be ruled out, but as far as I know, there's no evidence for it. <br /><br />Thus, the universe is probably <em>not </em>winking on and off millions of times each second, and does <em>not </em>have to be perpetually re-created. The gigantic conclusion Chopra draws from his premise is wrong, because the premise itself is wrong. <br /><br />This doesn't invalidate the rest of his book, which is interesting and provocative, but it does show that we must take pronouncements on science by non-experts with a grain of salt.<br /><br />A warning that definitely applies to any science-related posts you read in this space ... including, of course, this one.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1109376252148942642005-02-25T16:35:00.000-07:002005-02-25T17:09:01.213-07:00Bread and circusesSometimes the pessimists among us wonder if the human race is making any progress. Not scientific or technological progress - advancements in those areas are obvious - but <em>moral </em>progress. Are people today any better, any more civilized, than people of one thousand or two thousand years ago?<br /><br />I think the answer is yes. If you doubt it, you should read Daniel P. Mannix's <em>The Way of the Gladiator</em>, also published under the title <em>Those About to Die</em>. (The book is available at Amazon, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743413032/qid=1109376324/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-6555107-7853702?v=glance&s=books">here</a>.) <br /><br />Relying largely on ancient historians, Mannix recreates the atmosphere of the Roman arena - the bloody sand of the Circus Maximus and, later, the Colosseum. His book is a recitation of grisly horrors that is at once difficult to read and impossible to put down.<br /><br />The Roman "games" (<em>ludi</em>, in Latin) began as contests of athletic skill but degenerated into grotesque barbarism and unspeakably sadistic cruelty directed against criminals, prisoners of war, people out of favor with the government, and vast numbers of animals. The slaughter was horrific. The brutality was unbelievable. The crowd loved it. <br /><br />Certain historians doubt the reliability of the ancient sources, saying that the writers of the time exaggerated. This is possible, but even if the reality was only half as bad as the accounts, it was still almost indescribable. Consider a few examples quoted almost at random from Mannix's book:<br /><br /><blockquote>[There were] gladiators called andabatae, men wearing helmets without visors so they could not see. As soon as they reached the arena, these andabatae began to swing wildly around by chance to hit one another.... The crowd [roared] with laughter at the men's clumsy swings.... <br /><br />To keep the crowd amused during the noon hour, women were tied to bulls and dragged to death and little boys assaulted by men dressed as satyrs. A confessed Christian named Antipas was put in a bronze figure of a bull and a fire lighted under the image. The man's screams came out of the bull's open mouth as though the animal were bellowing. Chimpanzees were made drunk on wine and then encouraged to rape girls tied to stakes....<br /><br />The Romans had a robust sense of humor. At the time of Caligula, a gladiator had his right arm cut off [in combat] so he was helpless. The crowd considered this uproariously funny....<br /><br />A number of fast-moving novelty acts were introduced. Women were dragged behind chariots and the hounds set on them. "Legendary pageants" were staged showing the castration of Alys, Hercules being burned alive on a pyre, and Mucius Scaevola having his hand burned off. A prostitute and her pimp gave an exhibition of the various positions of sexual intercourse but in the middle of an embrace, [an animal trainer] set the Molossian hounds on the couple and they were quickly torn to pieces. A robber was crucified and bears encouraged to jump up and tear the dying man from the cross. A man representing Prometheus was chained to a rock and a trained eagle turned loose to pull out his liver. By the time the eagle was done with him, Martial tells us, "his mangled linmbs still lived although all the parts dripped blood and in all his body was nowhere a body's shape." </blockquote><br /><br />The crowd was driven to orgastic ecstasy by these varied tortures. Women would throw their jewelry and even their clothes into the arena. Fights would break out in the stands. Gangs of sexual sadists would bribe the arena staff so they could get close to the condemned prisoners, fondling them while shouting vivid descriptions of their impending fate. <br /><br />Almost no one found this objectionable. Rome's emperors all attended the "games," and most of them were enthusiastic about it, although a few, notably Marcus Aurelius, were not. Rome's intellectuals had no moral or ethical qualms about what went on in the arena. They seemed to regard the "games" as a useful mechanism of crowd control, and even as a beneficial instruction in the art of facing pain and death. <br /><br />Now, I ask you, could the "games" be held today? <br /><br />Yes, there are still examples of animal cruelty - cockfights, dogfights, bullfights. And yes, there are boxing matches and footgame games and auto races that sometimes result in death or serious injury. But would a modern American crowd enjoy the spectacle of women being dragged to their death by bulls or raped by chimps, or men, women, and children being torn apart by vicious carnivores? I don't think so. <br /><br />If the world has changed, what made the difference? Here it is interesting to quote another passage from Mannix. After observing that Rome's increasingly large population of Gauls, Germans, and Parthians had little interest in the "games" and thus reduced the attendance figures, he goes on to say:<br /><br /><blockquote>The Christian church was growing in power and did everything possible to stop the games. In 325 A.D., Constantine [the first emperor sympathetic to Christianity] tried to put an end to the games but they still continued. Then in 365 A.D. [after the formal conversion of the Empire to Christianity], Valentinian forbade sacrificing victims to wild beasts. He was able to make his edict stick, and that took all the fun out of the spectacles. In 399 A.D. the gladiatorial schools had to close for want of pupils.<br /><br />Then in 404 A.D., a [Christian] monk named Telemachus leaped into the arena and appealed to people to stop the fights. Telemachus was promptly stoned to death by the angry mob but his death ended the spectacles. The Emperor Honorius was so furious at Telemachus' lynching that he closed the arenas. They never reopened. </blockquote><br /><br />So it was mainly the advent of Christianity that stopped this fearsome, centuries-old exercise in sadism. <br /><br />Today it is fashionable to mock Christianity as hopelessly "retro" and out of step with our modern, sophisticated, pragmatic and amoral world. Yet if we look at what the world was like before Christianity, we see the "games" - and the crowds who loved them. <br /><br />Who says we aren't making progress?Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1109293203479601712005-02-24T17:35:00.000-07:002005-02-24T18:01:33.323-07:00SinRecently I've been having an interesting email dialogue with a dedicated Christian. In response to some questions of mine, she patiently explained Christianity's view of sin. Her basic point was that sin is impurity and begins with impure thoughts - lust, anger, and so on.<br /><br />My reaction was that if this is sin, then we are all guilty. If lust is equivalent to fornication, then we are all fornicators. For that matter, if anger is equivalent to murder, then nearly all of us are guilty of murder, too. I certainly am, since I have vividly imagined killing people who ticked me off (rude drivers, for instance). I wouldn't actually do it, but I can dream, can't I?<br /><br />At least now I have a better understanding of why, according to Christianity, <em>everyone </em>is sinful. I wonder, though, if this approach to morality is really helpful or even healthy. <br /> <br />Years ago I was involved in Objectivism, a cultish movement that grew up around the writings (and the charismatic personality) of the novelist Ayn Rand. As an Objectivist, I was caught up in the idea of perfectionism, because Rand's morality is very perfectionistic. You must be absolutely rational all the time, must never have a thought or feeling you can't justify, must never do anything on a whim, must never give less than 100% concentration ("focus," they call it) to the task at hand, etc. <br /><br />It was stultifying. <br /><br />Gradually I learned the truth in the old adage, "The perfect is the enemy of the good" - i.e., in trying to be perfect, we end up paralyzed and can't accomplish anything, whereas if we just try to be good, not perfect, then we can get things done. As a simple example, if I thought I had to write a "perfect" chapter, I would freeze up and not be able to write at all. But if I just want to write a good chapter, or a good-enough chapter, I can do that. <br /><br />So I have learned that perfectionism is my enemy. I have tried it, and it doesn't work. <br /><br />My problem with the Christian ethics, at least as it is usually preached, is that it is profoundly perfectionistic. Jesus is even quoted as saying, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Don't have the "wrong" feelings (lust or anger). Always turn the other cheek and go the extra mile. Love your enemies. <br /><br />Within limits, this is excellent advice. But with no limits attached, it becomes an unreal, otherworldly formula of perfection that can never be attained. <br /><br />If I were bold enough to rewrite the Bible, I would phrase these admonitions differently. I would say, "It's preferable not to experience excessive lust or anger; don't encourage it." "It's often better to turn the other cheek, if circumstances permit it." "It's emotionally healing to make peace with your enemies when you can." <br /><br />The gist of the ideas is good, but the all-or-nothing quality merely inculcates guilt at not living up to a standard that no one but a perfect being could live up to, anyway. <br /><br />And I wonder if my interpretation may not be closer to the original meaning of Jesus' words. I think we should consider the very real possibility - and I mean this seriously - that Jesus did not mean to be taken literally, but was <em>exaggerating for effect</em>. <br /><br />After all, he uses exaggeration all the time. Remember the Pharisee who strained out a gnat but swallowed a camel, or the splinter in our friend's eye and the log in our own? If he could exaggerate with those sayings, why not with others? To say "Love your enemy" might be a rhetorically effective way of making a simpler point: "Try not to hold a grudge; make peace with those you're feuding with, if you can; don't nurse hatred in your heart." If understood this way, "Love your enemy" is very good advice. If taken literally, it becomes impossible. Can anyone who lost a friend or loved one on 9-11 really <em>love </em>Al Qaeda? And should we feel guilty about <em>not </em>loving them? <br /><br />We can hear the "log in your eye" saying without worrying that there is an actual log in our eye. Why, then, do we insist on literalism in other sayings? <br /><br />Jesus was speaking to large, restless crowds. He had to hold their interest or they would wander away. He was speaking to simple people; he couldn't get involved in complex nuances that would go over their heads. He was shouting while he stood on a hillside or in a boat - hardly the ideal way to deliver an elaborate ethical treatise. And to connect with his audience, he had to express himself in the colorful vernacular of his day. Arabic idioms are full of exaggerated imagery and rhetorical flourishes. <br /><br />In short, we may be reading literally what we were meant to hear more idiomatically. "Love your enemy" gets the point across in simple, plain terms. As the condensed essence of a much more complex moral position, it is unobjectionable. If it becomes the entirety of one's morality, with no ifs, ands, or buts, then it is probably impracticable on earth. <br /><br />That's my way of looking at it, anyhow. And that's why I don't think sinners are as commonplace as Christianity would have us believe. Sin is a term I would reserve for the big stuff - destructive lying and betrayal, violence and murder, abuse of power. <br /><br />Most of us don't do those things. Maybe we don't have so much to feel guilty about, after all.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1109053414703090582005-02-21T22:40:00.000-07:002005-02-22T20:44:18.446-07:00An evolving positionWhen you read books and Web sites dealing with evolution, you can't help being drawn into the controversy between two firmly entrenched camps - the die-hard Darwinists, who believe that every aspect of life on earth can be explained by Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the equally zealous anti-Darwinists, who denigrate Darwin's ideas and consign them to the same scrapheap of 19th Century falsehoods where Freud and Marx have already been laid to rest. <br /><br />(I use the neutral term "anti-Darwinists" rather than the pejorative and often inaccurate term "creationists," which is favored by the pro-Darwin side. Not all anti-Darwinists are Biblical fundamentalists, and the current debate should not be lazily caricatured as a rehash of <em>Inherit the Wind</em>.) <br /><br />Personally, I'm inclined to look for the truth somewhere in the middle ground between the two sides, both of which can be dogmatic, stubborn, and unreasonable, even cruel in their personal attacks and invective. <br /><br />Despite what the anti-Darwin forces maintain, I think there is a great deal of evidence to support the contention that the various species on earth today have evolved from earlier species, a process that has taken millions of years. While the fossil record is not as complete as we might like, paleontologists have found good transitional forms between reptiles and birds, and between land-dwelling quadrupeds and whales. There is an excellent series of horse fossils showing how the earliest horse, Eohippus, evolved into progressively larger horses, along the way losing two of its four toes. Analysis of the genomes of living species also tends to support the thesis of common descent, with closely related animals having more genetic sequences in common than more distant relatives. And micro-evolution, at least, has been observed in the laboratory - in the breeding of exotic mutant fruitflies - and in the wild, where insects have developed resistance to pesticides, bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics, and populations of insects and birds have undergone measurable changes in response to environmental pressures. <br /><br />It is possible for anti-Darwinists to poke holes in some of this evidence, of course. Nothing in science, or any other field of empirical investigation, is ever 100% certain. There will always be weak spots to exploit. But the thrust of the evidence is strong enough to convince me that the general world picture painted by Darwinism is true. The estimable naturalist will not be joining Marx and Freud in the trash heap anytime soon.<br /><br />Still, the Darwinists, or at least the most vocal among them, are probably overstating the case when they suggest - or even say openly - that evolution by natural selection explains <em>everything</em>. This seems to be more of a philosophical conviction, or even a quasi-religious commitment, than a conclusion actually warranted by the evidence. In fact, the anti-Darwin side, for all its excesses and tendentious nitpicking, does make some good points. <br /><br />For one thing, Darwinism has nothing useful to say about abiogenesis - the origin of life. How the first living cell emerged from nonliving antecedents remains a mystery - actually a greater mystery than in Darwin's day, when the cell was believed to be a simple glob of protoplasm. Thanks to electron microscopy, we now know that the cell is a fantastically complex assembly of organic machines, more elaborate and sophisticated than any factory. The origin of such dazzling complexity, and above all of the encoded information in the genes that makes it possible, is a question that Darwinism - or scientific materialism as such - seems to have very little hope of answering. <br /><br />Then there is the problem of the first large-scale emergence of living creatures, the Cambrian Explosion, circa 530 million years ago. Pre-Cambrian rocks show traces of soft-bodied creatures like worms, as well as microscopic organisms, but these relatively minor developments pale in comparison with the vast array of creatures that appear at the very start of the Cambrian Era. Fifty phyla of animals (more than the number of phyla on earth today) pop into existence with disconcerting abruptness and with few obvious predecessors. Something other than gradualism seems to be involved here.<br /><br />Finally, there are the large jumps that incremental, progressive evolution is hard-pressed to explain. How, for instance, did egg-laying creatures evolve into creatures that bore live young? What sort of transitional reproductive apparatus can be imagined that lies halfway between laying eggs and giving birth? Yes, I know the duck-billed platypus and other monotremes are egg-laying mammals, but that's just the point - <em>they lay eggs</em>. They do not reproduce in some "transitional" manner that involves aspects of egg-laying and aspects of live birth. And it is hard to know what would constitute such a halfway position. In this area, it seems more logical to imagine a sudden jump from egg-laying to live birth - and yet a sudden jump is precisely what Darwinism forbids. <br /><br />In the end, there ought to be room for intelligent compromise. Darwinism explains a lot, but perhaps not everything. It is only hubris that keeps the extremists on both sides from acknowledging any validity to their opponents' position. <br /><br />My guess is that Darwinism will eventually share the fate of Newtonian physics. Once thought to explain everything in the physical world, Newton's laws have since been relegated to secondary status, encapsulated within the larger framework of quantum theory. Darwin's views may someday be seen in a similar way - as a useful, groundbreaking, brilliant, but only <em>partial </em>explanation. <br /><br />And if this happens, should anyone really be surprised? After all, what were the odds that a naturalist writing by candlelight in the age of horse-and-buggies would have the last word, for all time, on the deepest mysteries of life?<br /><br />Update (Feb. 22): After posting this comment, I realized that one paragraph may have been misleading. Just to be clear, when I say that there were more phyla in the Cambrian Era than there are today, I don't mean to suggest that there was greater diversity of life at that time than there is now. Although the number of phyla has declined from 50 to 37, the diversity within each phylum has greatly increased. As just one example, a single phylum, Chordata, contains <em>all </em>vertebrates - fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Still, the relatively sudden appearance of so many distinct body plans (mostly in a time frame of 5 to 10 million years) is problematic for Darwinism and may require some new thinking.Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1108675508394273162005-02-17T14:15:00.000-07:002005-02-17T14:25:08.396-07:00Wronging writersAh, the writer's life. Some people are very nice to writers. Others ... well, here's a real-life episode from a few years ago. I was attending a party at an apartment complex where I lived, and met a husband and wife in their late fifties or early sixties. Small talk ensued. They seemed affable enough at first - until the subject of my career came up.<br /><br />Husband: What sort of work do you do? <br />Me: I write novels. <br />Husband: But how do you make money? Do you have some other job?<br />Me: No, I just write books. <br />Husband (skeptical): And you make a living at that?<br />Me: I try. <br />Husband: How many have you written?<br />Me: Fifteen by now. I do one a year.<br />Husband (shocked and disapproving): You're a full-time writer, and you write ONLY one book a year?<br />Me: Well, um, yeah. <br /><br />Husband shakes his head in disgust and walks away. Wife lingers. <br /><br />Wife: What sort of books are they?<br />Me: Suspense novels.<br />Wife:: Oooh, I love mysteries. <br />Me: Well, they're not exactly mysteries.<br />Wife: Whodunits. I love whodunits.<br />Me: Mine aren't really whodunits.<br />Wife: What are they?<br />Me: Well, they're mostly about, um, serial killers.<br />Wife (wrinkling her nose and baring her teeth): UGH!<br /><br />Wife spins on her heel and marches off, leaving me alone.<br /><br />Within two minutes, I had managed to elicit reactions of unmitigated contempt from two total stangers. I left the party a few minutes later - slipping out the back door like a common thief. <br /><br />Mamas, don't let your children grow up to be writers ...Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1107902319401351762005-02-08T15:12:00.000-07:002005-02-08T15:38:39.400-07:00Intelligent Design and the cosmosThere's a little debate about Intelligent Design going on at <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp">the Corner</a>, National Review Online's blog. Simply stated, Intelligent Design is the view that the order and complexity of the universe imply a conscious plan. There are many aspects to this debate, but perhaps the most straightforward involves the habitability of our universe. Dozens of things at the moment of the Big Bang had to go "just right" in order for our cosmos to generate long-lived, slow-burning stars; and within those stars, still more things had to work out "just right" so that the fission and fusion reactions would produce the elements of the Periodic Table. Under most scenarios, the Big Bang would have collapsed back on itself, or produced a universe that consists solely of hydrogen, or produced a universe in chaos, or a hundred other dead ends. Yet we got "lucky." Somehow everything fell into place, and carbon-based life became possible. To many people, the degree of apparent "fine-tuning" necessary to bring about this result suggests an intention, a master plan behind it all.
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<br />Although this argument seems simple enough, there are some highly intelligent folks who just don't seem to understand it. I don't mean they disagree; I mean they don't see the force of the argument in the first place. Consider this quote from the Corner's John Derbyshire:
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<br /><blockquote>"The odds against the universe being the way it is are trillions trillions trillions to one!" [say Intelligent Design proponents.] So they are. The odds of ANY particular event are exceedingly small. SOMETHING has to happen, though. I met my wife in a remote town in northeast China. What, from the point of view of my working-class English mother contemplating me as a newborn, were the odds of THAT? I was bound to marry somebody, though. The odds of it being any particular person -- let alone a person on the other side of the world -- were infinitesimal... but SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN. </blockquote>
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<br />Now, Derbyshire is a smart man, but this rebuttal misses the point altogether. The point is not that our universe, as it stands, is merely unlikely. Any given thing that happens is unlikely, in the sense that it depends on a series of contingencies. The point of the Intelligent Design argument is that our universe is extraordinarily unlikely in a very special, very particular way: it is well suited for life. Yes, given that "something has to happen," <em>some </em>kind of universe could be expected. But why <em>this </em>kind, which is so perfectly set up for life, as opposed to the myriad other possible universes in which life would be impossible?
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<br />A critic might object: "If life weren't possible in the universe, then we wouldn't be around to wonder about it!" This is true, but irrelevant. Suppose a person, Smith, suffers a terrible car crash. His car is totaled, mangled, yet he walks away without a scratch. Smith might well say, "How did I ever escape from that accident alive?" Jones, a bystander, responds, "That's a meaningless question. If you hadn't lived through the crash, you wouldn't be around to ask about it."
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<br />But clearly Jones is wrong. Smith's question is <em>not </em>meaningless. Because the fact is, he <em>did </em>survive the crash, against all odds, and he is perfectly entitled to wonder how things turned out that way.
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<br />Nor is his question just idle speculation. Smith can investigate further. He can examine how the car was built, how the airbags deployed, how the brakes worked, etc. He can figure out why the driver's compartment did not collapse even though the rest of the car was crushed. In fact, engineers who run crash tests do exactly this sort of thing, and they learn a lot by doing it.
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<br />Coming back to the cosmos, we are perfectly entitled to ask, "How is it possible that the universe worked out in such a way that living, conscious beings like ourselves are here to wonder about it?"
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<br />Personally, I see much evidence of intention and purpose in our world, and precious little reason to accept the materialists' claim that randomness underlies everything. Intelligent Design is debatable, and it should be debated - but not by knocking down straw-man arguments. That approach is just, well, unintelligent.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1107737908346016662005-02-06T17:38:00.000-07:002005-02-06T17:59:27.076-07:00The occasional madness of reader reviewsI like Amazon.com's reader reviews. I really do. They are frequently more helpful and more insightful than the professional reviews posted on the same page. But sometimes they are just plain weird.
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<br />Case in point: Currently I'm reading the history book <em>The Last Apocalypse </em>by James Reston, Jr., an entertaining recreation of Europe circa AD 1000. At that time, Europe was under attack from three directions. The Vikings were pillaging and conquering England and France; the Magyars of Hungary were invading Germany and Italy; and the Moors, having conquered Spain, were threatening to make further inroads into Europe. Reston combines colorful myth and legend with dry archeological facts to present a highly readable account of an underreported era.
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<br />It's possible to quibble intelligently with Reston's approach, by criticizing his reliance on oral traditions that may not be accurate. When I checked Amazon's <em>Last Apocalypse </em>page, I found several reviewers who took this tack. I disagree with them, because without the oral tradition there is little to say about this period, which has few written records to guide us (most people were illiterate). Still, it's an arguable point.
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<br />But then I found this bizarre opinion, reproduced in its entirety:
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<br /><blockquote>Unless you're interested in what Reston had for breakfast on a given day rather than history look elsewhere.</blockquote>
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<br />Now, <em>what </em>is this guy talking about? The only thing I can figure is that this "reviewer" read the first page of the book, which begins, "I parked my Vauxall Roadster beside a hedgerow ...", and assumed that the whole book focused on Reston's travels through Europe.
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<br />Which it does not.
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<br />Having read no further than the opening sentence, the "reviewer" then crafted his unhelpful message. And because Amazon is a democracy, his two-star review counts as much as anyone else's, helping to bring down poor Mr. Reston's average rating.
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<br />Another thing I've noticed is that whenever any book on Amazon gets more than a handful of reviews, at least one of those reviews will be sharply and mean-spiritedly negative.
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<br />Some folks, it would seem, are so overflowing with hostility that they can't help but release some of it on the Web.
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<br />Kind of sad, don't you think?
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1107613548871678722005-02-05T07:10:00.000-07:002005-02-05T07:25:48.870-07:00Nasty peopleGeneralizations are dangerous. Nevertheless, sometimes they can be helpful. Consider this surprising admission from Ray Hyman, one of today's best-known skeptics of the paranormal:
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<br />“As a whole, parapsychologists are nice, honest people, while the critics are cynical, nasty people.” (The quote can be found <a href="http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/CSICOPoverview3.htm">here</a>.)
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<br />Hyman's cautious qualifier "as a whole" is surely justified. But I think, in general, he's right. Some of the critics are indeed "cynical, nasty people." I found an astonishing example of this not long ago at a <a href="http://www.mysonpeter.com/code/16response.html">Web site </a>created by a grieving father, who lost his young son in a freak accident. The father felt his son's spirit was visiting him at times, and started the site to report his experiences and ask for feedback. He was open to any and all suggestions, including the idea that it was all in his head. He was polite and thoughtful toward anyone who posted a comment.
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<br />Now, with these circumstances in mind, look at the following comment by a skeptic, which I reproduce in its entirety, with no corrections:
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<br /><blockquote>Subject: For real? Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 07:06:34 -0700 (PDT) Is this shit for real? Sounds like a horrible farse to me. Perhaps an experiment in the limits or extent of gullability? I will proceed on the assumption that you beleive this nonsense, and are not duping the fine discerning general public of the net ;) If your wife was stupid enough to dry her hair next to a bathtub full of water and your son, then drop the dryer in, well all I can say is Darwin was watching very carefully! Better her idiot genes not be spread. </blockquote>
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<br />Boy, the milk of human kindness is overflowing in this guy, isn't it?
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<br />"Cynical, nasty people," indeed.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1107483332830230792005-02-03T19:02:00.000-07:002005-02-03T19:15:32.830-07:00BlurbingOkay, so last week I read the manuscript of my friend <a href="http://www.jcarsonblack.com">J. Carson Black</a>'s second novel, which I enjoyed tremendously. I offered to give her a quote - not that a quote from me is likely to boost sales, but you do what you can.
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<br />Unfortunately I then hit a blank. I went for two days without finding the right words (and without really thinking about it). Today, needing inspiration, I had lunch at a local Mexican restaurant, notebook in hand. As I had hoped, the chicken tostada, sour cream enchilada, and salty margarita precipitated a burst of creativity!
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<br />(Well, mainly it was the margarita.)
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<br />Anyway, I got the job done - two entire sentences - which constitutes a pretty good day's work, if I do say so myself.
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<br />I won't reproduce the quote here, since the book doesn't come out for a year, but I will report that it contained adjectives like "perilous" and "harrowing," as well as an assortment of exciting nouns and a few obligatory but not terribly invigorating prepositions.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1107459395247675182005-02-03T13:32:00.000-07:002005-02-03T12:36:35.246-07:00New and improved!Several people have told me that it's nearly impossible to post a comment on this blog. (Which may explain why there are hardly any comments - though it's also possible that nobody is reading ... and really, can you blame them?)
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<br />Anyway, I have changed the settings to make it easier to comment. Registration is no longer required. You can comment anonymously.
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<br />I hope this helps.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1106946410833421512005-01-28T14:47:00.000-07:002005-03-26T12:46:22.036-07:00Mediumship and scienceUPDATE: After extensive discussion in our forum, I've conceded that eight of the nine items of information listed below are too ambiguous or too pedestrian to qualify as solid hits. The other item (no. 7; the blinds/curtains) still strikes me as evidential <em>if </em>no one involved in the experiment knew about it by any normal means. Hopefully this post gives you an idea of how hard it is to evaluate psychics and mediums objectively. An example of how <em>not </em>to evaluate this research is found in a very hostile and factually challenged article by "Luke T." at <a href="http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/schwartzkeen.htm">http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/schwartzkeen.htm</a>- MP<br /><br />Some folks might be interested in the kind of debate that surrounds the subject of mediumship and the scientific investigation of same. (Yes, there is serious study of this phenomenon, though you might not know it from the tabloid-style coverage the topic receives in the media.)<br /><br />In an online forum in which I participate, a session conducted by medium Allison DuBois has been the focus of some debate. Allison has recently become quite well known as the person whose life is dramatized in the NBC series <em>Medium</em> (Monday nights, 10:00 Eastern Time). A transcript of one part of this session is printed in a paper by Gary E. Schwartz and Julie Beischel - a paper that can be found at <a href="http://veritas.arizona.edu/survivaldetails.htm">http://veritas.arizona.edu/survivaldetails.htm</a> .<br /><br />Essentially, Allison was asked to read (by proxy) a lady named Veronica. What she produced was detailed information about Veronica's late husband. Allison was not told Veronica's last name, but in fact she was Veronica Keen, wife of the British parapsychology researcher Montague Keen.<br /><br />Objections to the procedure have centered on the possibility that Allison, upon hearing the name Veronica, jumped to the conclusion that it must be Mrs. Keen. Allegedly she could then have drawn on knowledge of Montague Keen's life and work in order to produce various seemingly evidential details.<br /><br />Allison had never met either of the Keens, but their names were known to many who are interested in paranormal phenomena.<br /><br />So is the session an example of legitimate mediumship or clever duplicity on Allison's part?<br /><br />What follows is my own modest contribution to the discussion, which may give you a feel for the issues and concerns raised in this field of study. Naturally, these remarks make a lot more sense if you read the transcript first!<br /><br />[Update, March 26, '05: Comments in square brackets have been added to indicate why I am no longer persuaded that eight of the nine items are evidential.]<br /><br /><div align="center">****</div><br />Peter's comments [i.e., a skeptical rejoinder by Dr. Peter Hayes] at the end of the paper are a good digest of objections that a skeptical reader might lodge. Most of them occurred to me, too, as I read the transcript. In particular, Allison's mention of the name Levine seemed like a spectacular hit - until the commentary revealed that the name Levin figured in both the dedication and the acknowledgments of Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek's book <em>The Living Energy Universe</em>. For the hit to be significant, we have to assume that Allison did not read this book. Similarly, her "white crow" reference is significant only if she is really unfamiliar with this term. Most people who are seriously interested in this field know the William James quote in question.<br /><br />Above all, hearing the name Veronica could have tipped her off to the identity of the deceased. I never met Montague Keen or his wife, but I knew that her name was Veronica, because this fact was mentioned more than once in Internet articles reporting on Keen's research. Not too long before his death, Keen got into an Internet dust-up with James Randi over an insult Randi allegedly delivered to Mrs. Keen (although Randi has a different, and to my mind rather unconvincing, version of the affair). The two conflicting accounts of this altercation were widely available on the Web.<br /><br />Nevertheless, there are some details in the transcript that are hard to explain even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that the medium was being deceptive.<br /><br />1. Allison implies that Montague Keen (hereafter MK) recalled lying on the grass and watching the clouds as a boy. MK did grow up on a farm. This fact was probably mentioned in some of his obituaries, but I don't think it was widely reported.<br /><br />[It turns out that this information was incorrect. According to Veronica Keen, Montague did <em>not</em>, in fact, grow up on a farm. He grew up in the city and did not purchase a farm until he was nearly fifty years old. In any case, Allison did not say MK grew up on a farm, only that he watched the clouds go by. Most children have done this.]<br /><br />2. She suggests that MK used to be worried about deadlines and about what other people thought of him. Apparently this was true, but it would not have been apparent from publicly available information. (I would have assumed he didn't care at all what other people thought of him, given his combative stance on controversial matters.)<br /><br />[The obvious objection is that almost everybody cares about deadlines and other people's opinions, at least some of the time.]<br /><br />3. She says MK has appeared to his wife since his death. This fact was eventually reported in a British newspaper, but was the British article printed before or after this session?<br /><br />[Many grieving widows or widowers feel that their spouse has appeared to them after death in some form, perhaps in a dream or as a "sign." Statement #3 could, therefore, apply to many people.] <br /><br />4. She mentions airplanes in a military formation. This detail came up in Laurie Campbell's reading of MK years earlier. Was Allison present at this meeting, or did she read a transcript or talk to Laurie about it? If not, it's hard to explain this as "hot reading."<br /><br />[The airplanes were said to be in a V formation, which of course could have been suggested by the name Veronica.] <br /><br />5. She mentions Veronica Keen's phone ringing and nobody on the line. This apparently happened. Again, unless reported in the press or on the Web before this session, could Allison have known it?<br /><br />[An interesting detail, but "phantom phone calls" are fairly common, and usually are attributable to telemarketers whose computers dial several numbers simultaneously.]<br /><br />6. She says MK made Laurie Campbell mad. He did, in the public reading.<br /><br />[If Allison knew that she was speaking to MK's widow, she might have known about the public reading.]<br /><br />7. She says that Veronica Keen just got new curtains for her house. Actually, she had just bought new blinds, but the association between curtains and blinds is very close. This information was certainly not publicly broadcast.<br /><br />8. She implies that Veronica Keen was more of a believer in the afterlife than was MK. Apparently this is true, but I would not have guessed it. I would have assumed they both held similiar views on the subject.<br /><br />[A matter of interpretation. MK did believe in the afterlife but adopted a somewhat skeptical approach in order to weed out frauds and fakery.]<br /><br />9. She says there was a banner at the meeting where MK collapsed. This turns out to be true, but I don't recall it being mentioned in any accounts of the event, and I have seen no photos of the incident.<br /><br />[If Allison knew that she was talking to Veronica Keen, she could easily have known the circumstances of MK's death, which took place at a public debate. Banners or signs are usually displayed at such gatherings.]<br /><br />There are possible explanations for all of these things. Allison could have read that MK was raised on a farm (1). [As noted above, this information was false anyway.] She could have talked to people who knew MK and learned something of his personality (2). She might have been aware of reports or rumors that MK was "appearing" to his wife or that the phone had been behaving strangely (3, 5). She might have been in contact with a friend or neighbor of Mrs. Keen who knew about the curtains and about Mrs. Keen's views on the afterlife versus her husband's views(7, 8). She might have gained access to the Laurie Campbell reading and learned about the airplanes and Laurie's frustration with MK (4, 6). She might have spoken to someone who was present at the meeting and saw the banner (9).<br /><br />These explanations would require a great deal of work on Allison's part. She (or an assistant) would have to<br /><br />- read MK's obituaries and news accounts of his death<br />- talk to people who knew MK without raising their suspicions<br />- keep abreast of reports or rumors of odd goings-on after MK's passing<br />- learn details of the Keen household from someone with inside information<br />- review the Laurie Campbell reading or talk to Laurie herself or bring in Laurie as a conspirator<br />- find someone who had attended the meeting and talk to him about it.<br /><br />If she had known in advance that she would be reading Veronica Keen, she might have had a motive to do these things. But if she had no idea that Veronica Keen was to be the sitter, why would she invest the time and effort in learning so much about MK and his wife?<br /><br />One other point (hold on while I don my skeptic's hat): There is one place in the transcript's commentary where I think we see the danger of over-interpreting. This is when Allison mentions bagels and lox in connection with MK. The commentary offers four possible explanations: a) it was a reference to Levin, who called himself "the hole in the bagel"; b) it was a reference to Mrs. Keen's custom of buying bagels for MK; c) it was a reference to bagels served at MK's wake; d) it was a reference to MK's brother-in-law, who sold lox, which MK used to eat whenever he visited.<br /><br />Four explanations (or three if you count b and c as one concept). When this many interpretations are possible, I think it is safe to say that the reference is not sufficiently clear to warrant any conclusions. (I note that the "lox" item was scored as a miss, though the "bagels" were not.)<br /><br />Overall, though, I think the onus of proof is on the skeptics to explain the more obscure items of information listed as 1 - 9 above.<br /><br />[Now I would say that while the reading is certainly of interest, most of the statements are too general to prove much. See how frustrating it is to do this sort of work? It's like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall!]Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1106878379579560892005-01-27T18:59:00.000-07:002005-01-27T19:12:59.580-07:00Pal JoeyIt's Thursday night, and time to wonder why the <em>Friends </em>spinoff <em>Joey </em>doesn't quite work.
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<br />Oh yes, it has its moments. But it falls short. Part of the problem may be the supporting characters. Joey's sister, for instance, is depicted as being one (very short) step above the level of a hooker. She's too skanky and scuzzy to be really likable. Joey's nephew is supposed to be a computer genius who's too geeky to get a date, but the actor who plays him looks like he stepped out of a Gap ad. This guy can't get a date? Hey, I've <em>been </em>a dateless geek, and I've <em>known </em>dateless geeks, and this kid, my friends, is <em>not </em>a dateless geek.
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<br />The only supporting character who is genuinely funny is Joey's agent. She livens up the show whenever she's around. The guy in the apartment complex who wants to be Joey's pal has potential but hasn't been used much. The blonde, wholesome apartment manager is pretty but blah, or maybe she's just pretty blah.
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<br />I thought the show would improve once Joey got a regular acting gig, but his role in a prime-time soap (the fictional series <em>Deep Powder</em>) hasn't sparked many laughs. The writers don't seem to get it. Yes, Joey was in a soap opera before, and it was funny. But it wasn't funny because it was a soap opera. It was funny because Joey, who is an idiot, played the role of a brilliant, world-famous neurosurgeon. In <em>Deep Powder</em>, he plays ... well, I'm not sure what he's supposed to be. The guy who owns the ski lodge? Whatever it is, it's not funny.
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<br />I'm still rooting for this show to succeed. I was a big fan of <em>Friends </em>and would like to see this spinoff work. The producers are planning to bring in new characters and cast members, presumably to make Joey's world seem a little less underpopulated.
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<br />Right now, though, <em><em>Joey </em></em>is looking more like <em>AfterM*A*S*H</em> than <em>Frasier</em>. And that's no joke.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1106867477016519472005-01-27T16:11:00.000-07:002005-01-27T16:11:17.016-07:00The end of paperbacks?It's hard to imagine a world without paperback books. Then again, twenty years ago it was hard to imagine a world without typewriters, yet how many of today's kids have ever seen a Smith-Corona or know what a platen is? Things change - even in the publishing business, which is notoriously resistant to institutional changes of all kinds.
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<br />What's changing now is the paperback end of the industry. To be blunt, mass-market paperbacks - the pocket-size editions sold for anywhere from $6 to $8.50 - are gradually becoming extinct.
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<br />You might not know this if you limit your book-buying excursions to your local Barnes & Noble superstore, where you will still find row after row of mass-market paperbacks. Trouble is, the majority of paperbacks have always been sold in venues outside book stores. Most paperbacks are sold in places like supermarkets, pharmacies, and newsstands. The folks who deliver books to those outlets are the same folks who deliver magazines. They are called "jobbers" or, in fancier language, "independent distributors."
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<br />And today the independent distribution network is collapsing.
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<br />It's a slow-motion collapse which has been going on for seven or eight years. A trenchant summary of the problem from an insider's perspective can be read here: <a href="http://www.bksp.org/RichardCurtis2.html">Backspace - The Writer's Place</a> .
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<br />But you don't need to know all the inside details to see what's happening. Just pay a visit to your local Safeway or Walgreen's. Where once there might have been fifty or a hundred different titles on display in the paperback section, now there are probably only a dozen or so. And those dozen are almost all Big Names - "brand name" authors - Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Nora Roberts, etc. Lesser known authors are represented sparingly, if at all.
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<br />The reason? As the number of independent distributors dropped from 600 to six, the remaining companies chose to concentrate on only the top titles and top authors. The result is less of a choice for the consumer and less of a chance for the up-and-coming writer.
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<br />The situation has been getting worse for a while, and is now reaching the critical stage. Unless some way is found to revive the distribution network, there simply will not be any profit in publishing the average mass-market paperback. Which means that such paperbacks, increasingly, will not be published.
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<br />In five years, could we face the prospect of a book business in which paperbacks are a rarity? In which only the Kings and Koontzes of the world get into softcover, and the rest of us poor scriveners don't? If so, then a midlist writer's only hope will be a hardcover deal - and hardcover deals aren't easy to get.
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<br />How many writers will be put out business and out of print if this trend continues? I don't want to think about it. Unfortunately, I guess I have to.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10422670.post-1106805341780274352005-01-26T22:45:00.000-07:002005-01-26T23:07:02.156-07:00Psychic DetectivesAs some readers may know, I've posted some essays on my Web site detailing the evidence for psychic phenomena (they can be found at <a href="http://michaelprescott.net/essays.htm">http://michaelprescott.net/essays.htm</a> ). Some folks get pretty exercised when they hear anyone speak in support of such claims. A while ago, one outraged emailer - saying that if ESP were real, it would be used in crime solving - challenged me to name a single psychic who ever worked for law enforcement. Having never studied this aspect of the subject, I had no ready answer.
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<br />If only Court TV's documentary series <em>Psychic Detectives </em>had been airing back then! It's a serious, levelheaded look at real cases in which psychics provided key information that led to the solution of major crimes. And it's a hit, as it deserves to be.
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<br /><em>Psychic Detectives </em>airs on Wednesday nights at 9:30 PM, Eastern Time. Check your local listings for the time in your area.
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<br />Intelligent, groundbreaking shows like this one are putting skeptics on the defensive - and I say it's about time.
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<br />Michael Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12963295565160636175noreply@blogger.com0