Friday, September 6, 2013
The Limits of Science
Robert Krulwich On Science Like us on FacebookWhat We Can Never, Ever Know: Does Science Have Limits?
by Robert Krulwich
September 06, 201311:52 AM I got two books in the mail that, if they could have, would've poked, scratched and ripped each others' pages out. I don't know if Martin Gardner and Patricia Churchland ever met, but their books show that there are radically, even ferociously, different ways to think about science. Gardner died last year. He was a science writer whose monthly "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American was wildly popular. Patricia Churchland is a philosopher who teaches at U.C. San Diego.
The issue between them is: How much can we know about the universe?
iStockphoto.com "I am a mysterian," says Gardner, in his new (posthumously published) autobiography. Mysterians, he writes, believe that some things — how life began, the nature of time, what consciousness is, whether there is free will — are so inherently complex that they will forever elude human understanding. Not only does "no philosopher or scientist living today [have] the foggiest notion" of how mind or time or consciousness work, "we believe" he wrote, "it is the height of hubris" to suppose those things will ever be understood completely.
Forever Unintelligible
Gardner allows that humans have wonderful brains, that we can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but he says there are still limits, hard limits.
Just as "there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even make it understand the square root of 2," he writes, "surely there are truths as far beyond our grasp as our grasp is beyond that of a cow." He concedes that once upon a time humans were chimp-like and over time developed brains that cracked the "square root of 2" problem — but that doesn't faze him. There are properties of our universe so profoundly complex that no sentient mind, no matter how enhanced, will ever understand them fully.
It's not clear from his book whether this is a scaling problem (that our brains are too small and the universe too, too big) or if the universe has been deeply designed to stay mysterious to its inhabitants. Either way, in his book he insists that some mysteries are permanent.
Gardner was a fine science writer, fearless, imaginative, daring. But he pushes his argument very far. Because some scientific questions are unanswerable, he says, maybe we shouldn't investigate them, that "[t]hese questions are so far above our natural human prowess that to fret about them seems as ridiculous as insisting that a dog understand general relativity."
Ignorance Is Just Ignorance
Patricia Churchland hates this notion. "Ignorance is just ignorance," she says. If you don't know something that doesn't mean you will never know it. In her new book, she writes, "There is something smugly arrogant about thinking, 'If I, with my great and wondrous brain, cannot imagine a solution to explain a phenomenon, then obviously the phenomenon cannot be explained at all. ... What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.' "
For centuries, she says, authority figures have argued that we will never understand germs or earthquakes or atoms or volcanoes — that even to try was to trespass on divine territory. But we trespassed. We asked. We probed. And we learned. People who say we will never fathom the nature of consciousness are just doing what previous authorities did — they are choosing to hide from knowledge; they're cowards.
Yay, Brain
When a friend of hers, another philosophy professor, jumped out of his seat at a conference and yelled, "I hate the brain, I hate the brain!" because all this attention to brain science was taking attention away from philosophical pursuits, she smelled his fear. "Does he worry that neuro-knowledge is forbidden fruit, a Promethean fire, a Pandora's box, ... an evil genie released from a rightly sealed bottle?"
Patricia Churchland calls people like Martin Gardner "anti-enlightenment." She's proud of the human brain, its reasoning ability, its resourcefulness, and given enough time, she suspects, no question is unanswerable, there are no permanent mysteries. In the end (and the end is a long, long time away), we will know it all.
Asking, Asking, Asking
And, then, a third book fell into my lap, not from a scientist, but from a poet, Stanley Kunitz. His views on this subject, casually mentioned at the end of a chapter, are my own. He wrote that he finds his life, his being here, deeply mystifying. He loses friends to diseases and doesn't know why. He loves deeply, but doesn't know how. "Can there be any possibility of completely understanding who we are and why we're here and where we're going? These are questions that can never be answered completely," Kunitz says, contradicting Patricia. But then, contradicting Martin, he takes the crucial next step, "But you have to keep on asking ..."
To me, that's the beauty of science: to know that you will never know everything, but you never stop wanting to, that when you learn something, for a second you feel crazy smart, and then stupid all over again as new questions come tumbling in. It's an urge that never dies, a game that never ends. Science is a rough trade, played, I hope, forever — and, sorry Patricia, sorry Martin, that's how I think of it, not limited, not unlimited, just an itch that always needs scratching.
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Patricia Churchland's new book is called Touching a Nerve: The Self As Brain. Martin Gardner's upcoming autobiography, to be released next month is Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, The Autobiography of Martin Gardner. I found Stanley Kunitz's thoughts in Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.
Birmingham England's New Library
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EmailAugust 30, 2013 6:11 pm
A new chapter for libraries
By Edwin Heathcote
A reflection on the changing face of a pivotal urban institution as the new £188m Library of Birmingham prepares to open to the public.
That wonderful, mad ambition to contain all the knowledge in the world has been with us for millennia. The Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC became the archetype, an Atlantis of lost learning and a symbol of a city. Later the torch would pass from cities to monasteries and palaces, as libraries became tools with which to praise God or monuments to wealth and power. These were secret, privileged environments: the monks at their cold, hard carrels, the princes and their cabinets of curiosity, the new universities with books chained to desks and locked behind cupboard doors.
It was the Enlightenment that inaugurated a rational new age based on knowledge, in which access to that knowledge was no longer seen as dangerous but as desirable. The Victorians, with a characteristic blend of paternalism and civic pride, instituted libraries as engines of self-improvement testifying to the dynamism of their new industrial cities. Books lost their chains and the library remains one of the few spaces in which we can feel we are citizens rather than consumers, a place to which access is free, in which we ourselves become free.
Today the solid, reassuring presence of the civic library is threatened, and not just by government cuts; the internet, we are told, is obviating the need for books. Yet the recent explosion in the building of big, spectacular and self-consciously symbolic libraries around the world would seem to contradict that idea. The latest of these, the £188m Library of Birmingham, will be Europe’s largest in terms of floor area when it opens on Tuesday. It is the fourth central library to serve Britain’s second city, the first having been built in 1865 and the third still standing just around the corner, a Brutalist 1970s inverted ziggurat now sadly doomed to demolition.
The new library is an unmissable landmark and its exuberance has, even before it has opened, enlivened the sparse plaza between the sombre neoclassical Baskerville House and the municipal modernism of Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, it is a gesture that allows the public sector to match the sculptural bravado of the nearby Bullring shopping centre’s striking, amoeboid Selfridges. Like Selfridges, the library seems to have borrowed motifs from fashion. The façade of interlinking circles looks more like a Tokyo fashion store than a civic structure, its open, glazed floors far more accessible than those of any of its austere predecessors.
The contemporary library is, of course, something very different to the stolid classical pile of a century ago. Designed to be open and light, modern libraries take their language more from the commercial corporate office than the civic landmark. They are also – whatever bibliophiles like me might think – about more than just books. As media come and go, from scrolls to VHS cassettes and CD-ROMs, the library adapts.
But what exactly is the role of the library building in the modern city? Brian Gambles, project director at the Library of Birmingham, tells me it “must be inclusive, transparent and inviting – a public space in the city which is welcoming to all”. Above all, it must be a showcase for learning. Gesturing to the huge, wide-open space of the foyer, he says: “We need to make this a landing strip for people who may not be culturally attuned to using a public building.”
In a manner, that is precisely why the contemporary library has absorbed the tropes of commercial and retail architecture, becoming closer to a mall than the hushed halls of the past. Mecanoo’s founder, Francine Houben, tells me with huge enthusiasm that the façade is “designed to suggest the city’s history of industry, jewellery-making and craftsmanship” but in fact it does quite the opposite, the thin appliqué screen hinting at a certain superficiality. When I ask whether the thousands of metal circles were manufactured locally (this is, after all, still the heart of Britain’s precision metalworking industry), Houben candidly, if a little defensively, comes back: “No, no one could make them here. They were made in Munich.”
I’m often suspicious of buildings that use transparency as a metaphor for accessibility – glass walls are the great cliché of the democratisation of architecture. But the Library of Birmingham’s ground floor does, however, appear to be a real success, a concourse that absorbs the bustle of the pre-theatre crowds from the neighbouring Rep with which it shares the space (Gambles calls this “the partnership of the written and the spoken word”), the animation of the street, the activity of the children’s library below, and the motion of the escalators that will draw visitors up and into the massive, wonderfully theatrical bookstacks above.
It is far from unique in these ambitions of openness. London-based architect David Adjaye used similar ideas in 2004 and 2005 to reinvent the language of the library in his two east London Idea Stores, which aimed to reach a young, multicultural, often deprived constituency who had no collective memory of the civic library. The Seattle Public Library, built in 2004 by OMA (based, like Mecanoo, in the Netherlands), is arguably one of the most radical and even revolutionary civic buildings of the new century. It might be best known for its inventive continuous book-stacked ramp, which rises as the numbers of the Dewey Decimal system increase, but most surprising for me when I visited shortly after it opened was that its striking glass-roofed reading room was inhabited mostly by Seattle’s homeless, gently dozing over randomly selected books. It presented the city with a truly public and genuinely generous public space.
In return for that generosity, libraries are also passionately loved. The rash of closures of local libraries by cash-stricken local authorities in England has prompted real (and justified) outrage of the kind only otherwise witnessed with the closure of hospitals. Libraries are seen as remnants of a real public realm; they are spaces that belong to citizens. Recent proposals to reconfigure New York’s imposing 42nd St public library (losing many of the hallowed bookstacks) and close down two other branches were greeted with dismay and vocal protests in the city – even though Norman Foster’s plan actually increases the space available to the public. Big capital projects such as 42nd St and Birmingham will always attract ire when hundreds of smaller, local libraries are under threat.
If the library is a metaphor for the city itself, it can play just as profound a role in creating the image of a nation. One of the most famous images in architecture is visionary architect Etienne-Louis Boullée’s single-point perspective of a library for Paris (1785), a vast vaulted space in which the books are bricks and readers sit below a coffered vault foreshadowing the great roofs of the 19th-century stations. This was a model for a rational new France based, like Diderot’s encyclopedia, on knowledge.
The tradition of an architecture parlante reached a nadir in 1996 with Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a grand projet initiated by François Mitterrand. This library’s four glazed, L-shaped towers rapidly roasted the valuable books and papers housed in them and proved barely usable until modified with an expensive shutter system.
Very different indeed are the library parks of Medellín, Colombia’s second city, built at the suggestion of the citizens (many dwelling in favelas) after they were asked what infrastructure they needed most. A blend of public realm, library and school, these carefully and coolly designed buildings have transformed lives in some of the country’s poorest communities.
Even more striking in its ambition to become a symbol of a nation is the planned library for Baghdad. The city once boasted the world’s best libraries and, when they were destroyed by the Mongols in 1258, the legend is that the Tigris turned black with ink. In April 2003, US troops were criticised for standing by as the National Library of Baghdad was looted and ransacked in a terrible historical echo.
The architects behind the new design stress the building’s role as public space. “Libraries are traditionally unsociable, with no talking,” says Amir Mousawi of AMBS, which has offices in London and Baghdad. “But now all that has changed and the library isn’t that kind of space any more. There are few places for social exchange in Baghdad, places where boys and girls can mix and where that kind of exchange is possible – this library needs to be one of them.”
The security situation in the city demands that the library should be in a gated complex but it is proposed, nevertheless, as exactly the kind of free, open public space the city currently lacks. Its architecture is as theatrical, acrobatic and as symbolic of an ideal of national renewal as any library anywhere.
In Birmingham, I ask Gambles whether there can be any economic justification for such a huge capital outlay on one building. He takes a deep breath. “There isn’t a metric but there are a lot of arguments,” he says. “You want the library to be part of a better economic future. We have a business support centre, a whole floor of the building from where we hope to launch 500 new businesses a year.”
Ultimately, however, the emphasis is firmly on education – and Gambles believes that this represents a return to a traditional role. “When the public library service started in the 1850s, it was about how to give opportunities to those who didn’t have opportunities to learn through the formal system,” he says. “Over time we lost that and the library became about transaction, about finding and borrowing products. That transactional function is withering as there are now so many more media than just the book.”
The old, forlorn Birmingham library sat over a dark shopping mall, ambitiously named Paradise Circus, after Paradise Street, site of the city’s first library. Jorge Luis Borges, who for 18 years was the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, once said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” In Birmingham’s new library, as in every other library, it is easy to see what he meant.
I would love to see libraries build more rooms for learning, be it lectures, demonstrations, book clubs, or whatever the cause. Would that they kept those rooms full from sun up to sun down with citizens actively searching the stacks for ideas, proofs, and inspiration. Unfortunately, civic libraries tend to remain mired in academic isolation and monastic quiet. Report AGB
Hmmm - that's an interpolation by the writer. At no point does any proponent, financier, designer or user of a library mention that "core value" as essential to the modern built space. Rather, it seems a "library" these days is a showcase for artistic ego, communitarian theory and moderately snug welfare provision. "Learning" - not so much.
People Over 60
People over 60 deserve to say what they really think and not to have to think about what they say before they say it because they've already done all of their thinking and nobody listens to what we say anyway. Just sayin.
It Takes A Government
September 5, 2013, 9:11 pm 1 Comment
by Paul Krugman
September 5, 2013, 9:08 pm 15 Comments
It Takes A Government (To Make A Market)
Lots of reporting on the new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of what we know so far (pdf) about premiums under Obamacare. It definitely looks as if there will be a mild “rate shock” — in the right direction. KFF:
While premiums will vary significantly across the country, they are generally lower than expected.
What’s going on here? Partly it’s a vindication of the idea that you can make health insurance broadly affordable if you ban discrimination based on preexiting conditions while inducing healthy individuals to enter the risk pool through a combination of penalties and subsidies. But there’s an additional factor, that even supporters of the Affordable Care Act mostly missed: the extent to which, for the first time, the Act is creating a truly functioning market in nongroup insurance.
Until now there has been sort of a market — but one that, as Kenneth Arrow pointed out half a century ago, is riddled with problems. It was very hard for individuals to figure out what they were buying — what would be covered, and would the policies let them down? Price and quality comparisons were near-impossible. Under these conditions the magic of the marketplace couldn’t work — there really wasn’t a proper market. And insurers competed with each other mainly by trying to avoid covering people who really needed insurance, and finding excuses to drop coverage when people got sick.
With the ACA, however, insurers operate under clear ground rules, with clearly defined grades of plan and discrimination banned. The result, suddenly, is that we have real market competition.
In an alternative universe, conservatives would be celebrating this good news as a vindication of their views. See, the Heritage Foundation — which actually developed the original version of this plan! — was right! You don’t need single-payer, just a properly set up market system. (For the record, I believe that single-payer would be better and cheaper, and it’s still a goal we should seek).
But in this universe, conservatives claim that creating a real market for health insurance, and making sure that everyone can afford it, is the moral equivalent of slavery.
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Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Neuro Naysayers
by Adam Gopnik
Science;Neuroscience;Robert A. Burton;“A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind”;Sally Satel;Scott O. Lilienfeld;“Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuro-Science”Good myths turn on simple pairs— God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a long-lived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being so. The division has had new energy in our time: we care most about a person who is like a thinking machine at a moment when we have begun to have machines that think. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, is not only a Romantic, like so many other heroes, but a Romantic on a starship in a vacuum in deep space. When your entire body is every day dissolved, reënergized, and sent down to a new planet, and you still believe in the ineffable human spirit, you have really earned the right to be a soul man.
Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it.
Myths depend on balance, on preserving their eternal twoness, and so we have on our hands a sudden and severe Kirkist backlash. A series of new books all present watch-and-ward arguments designed to show that brain science promises much and delivers little. They include “A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind” (St. Martin’s), by Robert A. Burton; “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuro-Science” (Basic), by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld; and “Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind” (Princeton), by a pair of cognitive scientists, Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.“Bumpology” is what the skeptical wit Sydney Smith, writing in the eighteen-twenties, called phrenology, the belief that the shape of your skull was a map of your mind. His contemporary heirs rehearse, a little mordantly, failed bits of Bumpology that indeed seem more like phrenology than like real psychology. There was the left-right brain split, which insisted on a far neater break within our heads (Spock bits to the left, Kirk bits to the right) than is now believed to exist. The skeptics revisit the literature on “mirror neurons,” which become excited in the frontal lobes of macaque monkeys when the monkeys imitate researchers, and have been used to explain the origins of human empathy and sociability. There’s no proof that social-minded Homo sapiens has mirror neurons, while the monkeys who certainly do are not particularly social. (And, if those neurons are standard issue, then they can’t be very explanatory of what we mean by empathy: Bernie Madoff would have as many as Nelson Mandela.)
It turns out, in any case, that it’s very rare for any mental activity to be situated tidily in one network of neurons, much less one bit of the brain. When you think you’ve located a function in one part of the brain, you will soon find that it has skipped town, like a bail jumper. And all of the neuro-skeptics argue for the plasticity of our neural networks. We learn and shape our neurology as much as we inherit it. Our selves shape our brains at least as much as our brains our selves.
Each author, though, has a polemical project, something to put in place of mere Bumpology. (People who write books on indoor plumbing seldom feel obliged to rival Vitruvius as theorists of architecture, but it seems that no one can write about one neuron without explaining all thought.) “Brainwashed” is nervously libertarian; Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and she and Lilienfeld are worried that neuroscience will shift wrongdoing from the responsible individual to his irresponsible brain, allowing crooks to cite neuroscience in order to get away with crimes. This concern seems overwrought, copping a plea via neuroscience not being a significant social problem. Burton, a retired medical neurologist, seems anxious to prove himself a philosopher, and races through a series of arguments about free will and determinism to conclude that neuroscience doesn’t yet know enough and never will. Minds give us the illusion of existing as fixed, orderly causal devices, when in fact they aren’t. Looking at our minds with our minds is like writing a book about hallucinations while on LSD: you can’t tell the perceptual evidence from your own inner state. “The mind is and will always be a mystery,” Burton insists. Maybe so, and yet we’re perfectly capable of probing flawed equipment with flawed equipment: we know that our eyes have blind spots, even as we look at the evidence with them, and we understand all about the dog whistles we can’t hear. Since in the past twenty-five years alone we’ve learned a tremendous amount about minds, it’s hard to share the extent of his skepticism. Psychology is an imperfect science, but it’s a science.
In “Neuro,” Rose and Abi-Rached see the real problem: neuroscience can often answer the obvious questions but rarely the interesting ones. It can tell us how our minds are made to hear music, and how groups of notes provoke neural connections, but not why Mozart is more profound than Manilow. Courageously, they take on, and dismiss, the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet that seem to undermine the idea of free will. For a muscle movement, Libet showed, the brain begins “firing”—choosing, let’s say, the left joystick rather than the right—milliseconds before the subject knows any choice has been made, so that by the time we think we’re making a choice the brain has already made it. Rose and Abi-Rached are persuasively skeptical that “this tells us anything about the exercise of human will in any of the naturally occurring situations where individuals believe they have made a conscious choice—to take a holiday, choose a restaurant, apply for a job.” What we mean by “free will” in human social practice is just a different thing from what we might mean by it in a narrower neurological sense. We can’t find a disproof of free will in the indifference of our neurons, any more than we can find proof of it in the indeterminacy of the atoms they’re made of.
A core objection is that neuroscientific “explanations” of behavior often simply re-state what’s already obvious. Neuro-enthusiasts are always declaring that an MRI of the brain in action demonstrates that some mental state is not just happening but is really, truly, is-so happening. We’ll be informed, say, that when a teen-age boy leafs through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue areas in his brain associated with sexual desire light up. Yet asserting that an emotion is really real because you can somehow see it happening in the brain adds nothing to our understanding. Any thought, from Kiss the baby! to Kill the Jews!, must have some route around the brain. If you couldn’t locate the emotion, or watch it light up in your brain, you’d still be feeling it. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Satel and Lilienfeld like the term “neuroredundancy” to “denote things we already knew without brain scanning,” mockingly citing a researcher who insists that “brain imaging tells us that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a ‘real disorder.’ ” The brain scan, like the word “wired,” adds a false gloss of scientific certainty to what we already thought. As with the old invocation of “culture,” it’s intended simply as an intensifier of the obvious.
Phrenology, the original Bumpology, at least had the virtue of getting people to think about “cortical location,” imagining, for the first time, that the brain might indeed be mapped into areas. Bumpology brought a material order, however factitious, to a metaphysical subject. In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks. How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that.
For all the exasperations of neurotautology, there’s a basic, arresting truth to neo-Bumpology. In a new, belligerently pro-neuro book, “The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime” (Pantheon), Adrian Raine, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses a well-studied case in which the stepfather of an adolescent girl, with no history of pedophilia, began to obsess over child pornography and then to molest his stepdaughter. He was arrested, arraigned, and convicted. Then it emerged that he had a tumor, pressing on the piece of the brain associated with social and sexual inhibitions. When it was removed, the wayward desires vanished. Months of normality ensued, until the tumor began to grow back and, with it, the urges.
Now, there probably is no precise connection between the bit of the brain the tumor pressed on and child lust. The same bit of meat-matter pressing on the same bit of brain in some other head might have produced some other transgression—in the head of a Lubavitcher, say, a mad desire to eat prosciutto. But it would still be true that what we think of as traditionally deep matters of guilt and temptation and taboo, the material of Sophocles and Freud, can be flicked on and off just by physical pressure. You have to respect the power of the meat to change the morals so neatly.
In one sense, this is more neuro-redundancy. Charting a path between these two truths is the philosopher Patricia S. Churchland’s project in “Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain” (Norton), a limited defense of the centrality of neuro. She is rightly contemptuous of the invocation of “scientism” to dismiss the importance of neuroscience to philosophy, seeing that resistance as identical to the Inquisition’s resistance to Galileo, or the seventeenth century’s to Harvey’s discovery of the pumping heart:
This is the familiar strategy of let’s pretend. Let’s believe what we prefer to believe. But like the rejection of the discovery that Earth revolves around the sun, the let’s pretend strategy regarding the heart could not endure very long. . . . Students reading the history of this period may be as dumbfounded regarding our resistance to brain science as we are now regarding the seventeenth-century resistance to the discovery that the heart is a meat pump.
Humanism not only has survived each of these sequential demystifications; they have made it stronger by demonstrating the power of rational inquiry on which humanism depends. Every time the world becomes less mysterious, nature becomes less frightening, and the power of the mind to grasp reality more sure. A constant reduction of mystery to matter, a belief that we can name natural rules we didn’t make—that isn’t scientism. That’s science.
Yet Churchland also makes beautifully clear how complex and contingent the simplest brain business is. She discusses whether the hormone testosterone makes men angry. The answer even to that off-on question is anything but straightforward. Testosterone counts for a lot in making men mad, but so does the “stress” hormone cortisol, along with the “neuromodulator” serotonin, which affects whether the aggression is impulsive or premeditated, and the balance between all these things is affected by “other hormones, other neuromodulators, age and environment.”
So this question, like any other about neurology, turns out to be both simply mechanical and monstrously complex. Yes, a hormone does wash through men’s brains and makes them get mad. But there’s a lot more turning on than just the hormone. For a better analogy to the way your neurons and brain chemistry run your mind, you might think about the way the light switch runs the lights in your living room. It’s true that the light switch in the corner turns the lights on in the living room. Nor is that a trivial observation. How the light switch gets wired to the bulb, how the bulb got engineered to be luminous—all that is an almost miraculously complex consequence of human ingenuity. But at the same time the light switch on the living-room wall is merely the last stage in a long line of complex events that involve waterfalls and hydropower and surge protectors and thousands of miles of cables and power grids. To say the light switch turns on the living-room light is both true—vitally true, if you don’t want to bang your shins on the sofa sneaking home in the middle of the night—and wildly misleading.
It’s perfectly possible, in other words, to have an explanation that is at once trivial and profound, depending on what kind of question you’re asking. The strength of neuroscience, Churchland suggests, lies not so much in what it explains as in the older explanations it dissolves. She gives a lovely example of the panic that we feel in dreams when our legs refuse to move as we flee the monster. This turns out to be a straightforward neurological phenomenon: when we’re asleep, we turn off our motor controls, but when we dream we still send out signals to them. We really are trying to run, and can’t. If you feel this, and also have the not infrequent problem of being unable to distinguish waking and dreaming states, you might think that you have been paralyzed and kidnapped by aliens.
There are no aliens; there is not even a Freudian wave of guilt driving the monster. It’s just those neuromotor neurons, making the earth sticky. The best thing for people who have recurrent nightmares of this kind is to get more REM rest. “Get more sleep,” Churchland remarks. “It works.” Neurology should provide us not with sudden explanatory power but with a sense of relief from either taking too much responsibility for, or being too passive about, what happens to us. Autism is a wiring problem, not a result of “refrigerator mothers.” Schizophrenia isn’t curable yet, but it looks more likely to be cured by getting the brain chemistry right than by finding out what traumatized Gregory Peck in his childhood. Neuroscience can’t rob us of responsibility for our actions, but it can relieve us of guilt for simply being human. We are in better shape in our mental breakdowns if we understand the brain breakdowns that help cause them. This is a point that Satel and Lilienfeld, in their eagerness to support a libertarian view of the self as a free chooser, get wrong. They observe of one “brilliant and tormented” alcoholic that she, not her heavy drinking, was responsible for her problems. But, if we could treat the brain circuitry that processes the heavy drinking, we might very well leave her just as brilliant and tormented as ever, only not a drunk. (A Band-Aid, as every parent knows, is an excellent cure whenever it’s possible to use one.)
The really curious thing about minds and brains is that the truth about them lies not somewhere in the middle but simultaneously on both extremes. We know already that the wet bits of the brain change the moods of the mind: that’s why a lot of champagne gets sold on Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, if the mind were not a high-level symbol-managing device, flower sales would not rise on Valentine’s Day, too. Philosophy may someday dissolve into psychology and psychology into neurology, but since the lesson of neuro is that thoughts change brains as much as brains thoughts, the reduction may not reduce much that matters. As Montaigne wrote, we are always double in ourselves. Or, as they say on the Enterprise, it takes all kinds to run a starship. ♦
Science;Neuroscience;Robert A. Burton;“A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind”;Sally Satel;Scott O. Lilienfeld;“Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuro-Science”Good myths turn on simple pairs— God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a long-lived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being so. The division has had new energy in our time: we care most about a person who is like a thinking machine at a moment when we have begun to have machines that think. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, is not only a Romantic, like so many other heroes, but a Romantic on a starship in a vacuum in deep space. When your entire body is every day dissolved, reënergized, and sent down to a new planet, and you still believe in the ineffable human spirit, you have really earned the right to be a soul man.
Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it.
Myths depend on balance, on preserving their eternal twoness, and so we have on our hands a sudden and severe Kirkist backlash. A series of new books all present watch-and-ward arguments designed to show that brain science promises much and delivers little. They include “A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind” (St. Martin’s), by Robert A. Burton; “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuro-Science” (Basic), by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld; and “Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind” (Princeton), by a pair of cognitive scientists, Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.“Bumpology” is what the skeptical wit Sydney Smith, writing in the eighteen-twenties, called phrenology, the belief that the shape of your skull was a map of your mind. His contemporary heirs rehearse, a little mordantly, failed bits of Bumpology that indeed seem more like phrenology than like real psychology. There was the left-right brain split, which insisted on a far neater break within our heads (Spock bits to the left, Kirk bits to the right) than is now believed to exist. The skeptics revisit the literature on “mirror neurons,” which become excited in the frontal lobes of macaque monkeys when the monkeys imitate researchers, and have been used to explain the origins of human empathy and sociability. There’s no proof that social-minded Homo sapiens has mirror neurons, while the monkeys who certainly do are not particularly social. (And, if those neurons are standard issue, then they can’t be very explanatory of what we mean by empathy: Bernie Madoff would have as many as Nelson Mandela.)
It turns out, in any case, that it’s very rare for any mental activity to be situated tidily in one network of neurons, much less one bit of the brain. When you think you’ve located a function in one part of the brain, you will soon find that it has skipped town, like a bail jumper. And all of the neuro-skeptics argue for the plasticity of our neural networks. We learn and shape our neurology as much as we inherit it. Our selves shape our brains at least as much as our brains our selves.
Each author, though, has a polemical project, something to put in place of mere Bumpology. (People who write books on indoor plumbing seldom feel obliged to rival Vitruvius as theorists of architecture, but it seems that no one can write about one neuron without explaining all thought.) “Brainwashed” is nervously libertarian; Satel is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and she and Lilienfeld are worried that neuroscience will shift wrongdoing from the responsible individual to his irresponsible brain, allowing crooks to cite neuroscience in order to get away with crimes. This concern seems overwrought, copping a plea via neuroscience not being a significant social problem. Burton, a retired medical neurologist, seems anxious to prove himself a philosopher, and races through a series of arguments about free will and determinism to conclude that neuroscience doesn’t yet know enough and never will. Minds give us the illusion of existing as fixed, orderly causal devices, when in fact they aren’t. Looking at our minds with our minds is like writing a book about hallucinations while on LSD: you can’t tell the perceptual evidence from your own inner state. “The mind is and will always be a mystery,” Burton insists. Maybe so, and yet we’re perfectly capable of probing flawed equipment with flawed equipment: we know that our eyes have blind spots, even as we look at the evidence with them, and we understand all about the dog whistles we can’t hear. Since in the past twenty-five years alone we’ve learned a tremendous amount about minds, it’s hard to share the extent of his skepticism. Psychology is an imperfect science, but it’s a science.
In “Neuro,” Rose and Abi-Rached see the real problem: neuroscience can often answer the obvious questions but rarely the interesting ones. It can tell us how our minds are made to hear music, and how groups of notes provoke neural connections, but not why Mozart is more profound than Manilow. Courageously, they take on, and dismiss, the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet that seem to undermine the idea of free will. For a muscle movement, Libet showed, the brain begins “firing”—choosing, let’s say, the left joystick rather than the right—milliseconds before the subject knows any choice has been made, so that by the time we think we’re making a choice the brain has already made it. Rose and Abi-Rached are persuasively skeptical that “this tells us anything about the exercise of human will in any of the naturally occurring situations where individuals believe they have made a conscious choice—to take a holiday, choose a restaurant, apply for a job.” What we mean by “free will” in human social practice is just a different thing from what we might mean by it in a narrower neurological sense. We can’t find a disproof of free will in the indifference of our neurons, any more than we can find proof of it in the indeterminacy of the atoms they’re made of.
A core objection is that neuroscientific “explanations” of behavior often simply re-state what’s already obvious. Neuro-enthusiasts are always declaring that an MRI of the brain in action demonstrates that some mental state is not just happening but is really, truly, is-so happening. We’ll be informed, say, that when a teen-age boy leafs through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue areas in his brain associated with sexual desire light up. Yet asserting that an emotion is really real because you can somehow see it happening in the brain adds nothing to our understanding. Any thought, from Kiss the baby! to Kill the Jews!, must have some route around the brain. If you couldn’t locate the emotion, or watch it light up in your brain, you’d still be feeling it. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Satel and Lilienfeld like the term “neuroredundancy” to “denote things we already knew without brain scanning,” mockingly citing a researcher who insists that “brain imaging tells us that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a ‘real disorder.’ ” The brain scan, like the word “wired,” adds a false gloss of scientific certainty to what we already thought. As with the old invocation of “culture,” it’s intended simply as an intensifier of the obvious.
Phrenology, the original Bumpology, at least had the virtue of getting people to think about “cortical location,” imagining, for the first time, that the brain might indeed be mapped into areas. Bumpology brought a material order, however factitious, to a metaphysical subject. In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks. How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that.
For all the exasperations of neurotautology, there’s a basic, arresting truth to neo-Bumpology. In a new, belligerently pro-neuro book, “The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime” (Pantheon), Adrian Raine, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses a well-studied case in which the stepfather of an adolescent girl, with no history of pedophilia, began to obsess over child pornography and then to molest his stepdaughter. He was arrested, arraigned, and convicted. Then it emerged that he had a tumor, pressing on the piece of the brain associated with social and sexual inhibitions. When it was removed, the wayward desires vanished. Months of normality ensued, until the tumor began to grow back and, with it, the urges.
Now, there probably is no precise connection between the bit of the brain the tumor pressed on and child lust. The same bit of meat-matter pressing on the same bit of brain in some other head might have produced some other transgression—in the head of a Lubavitcher, say, a mad desire to eat prosciutto. But it would still be true that what we think of as traditionally deep matters of guilt and temptation and taboo, the material of Sophocles and Freud, can be flicked on and off just by physical pressure. You have to respect the power of the meat to change the morals so neatly.
In one sense, this is more neuro-redundancy. Charting a path between these two truths is the philosopher Patricia S. Churchland’s project in “Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain” (Norton), a limited defense of the centrality of neuro. She is rightly contemptuous of the invocation of “scientism” to dismiss the importance of neuroscience to philosophy, seeing that resistance as identical to the Inquisition’s resistance to Galileo, or the seventeenth century’s to Harvey’s discovery of the pumping heart:
This is the familiar strategy of let’s pretend. Let’s believe what we prefer to believe. But like the rejection of the discovery that Earth revolves around the sun, the let’s pretend strategy regarding the heart could not endure very long. . . . Students reading the history of this period may be as dumbfounded regarding our resistance to brain science as we are now regarding the seventeenth-century resistance to the discovery that the heart is a meat pump.
Humanism not only has survived each of these sequential demystifications; they have made it stronger by demonstrating the power of rational inquiry on which humanism depends. Every time the world becomes less mysterious, nature becomes less frightening, and the power of the mind to grasp reality more sure. A constant reduction of mystery to matter, a belief that we can name natural rules we didn’t make—that isn’t scientism. That’s science.
Yet Churchland also makes beautifully clear how complex and contingent the simplest brain business is. She discusses whether the hormone testosterone makes men angry. The answer even to that off-on question is anything but straightforward. Testosterone counts for a lot in making men mad, but so does the “stress” hormone cortisol, along with the “neuromodulator” serotonin, which affects whether the aggression is impulsive or premeditated, and the balance between all these things is affected by “other hormones, other neuromodulators, age and environment.”
So this question, like any other about neurology, turns out to be both simply mechanical and monstrously complex. Yes, a hormone does wash through men’s brains and makes them get mad. But there’s a lot more turning on than just the hormone. For a better analogy to the way your neurons and brain chemistry run your mind, you might think about the way the light switch runs the lights in your living room. It’s true that the light switch in the corner turns the lights on in the living room. Nor is that a trivial observation. How the light switch gets wired to the bulb, how the bulb got engineered to be luminous—all that is an almost miraculously complex consequence of human ingenuity. But at the same time the light switch on the living-room wall is merely the last stage in a long line of complex events that involve waterfalls and hydropower and surge protectors and thousands of miles of cables and power grids. To say the light switch turns on the living-room light is both true—vitally true, if you don’t want to bang your shins on the sofa sneaking home in the middle of the night—and wildly misleading.
It’s perfectly possible, in other words, to have an explanation that is at once trivial and profound, depending on what kind of question you’re asking. The strength of neuroscience, Churchland suggests, lies not so much in what it explains as in the older explanations it dissolves. She gives a lovely example of the panic that we feel in dreams when our legs refuse to move as we flee the monster. This turns out to be a straightforward neurological phenomenon: when we’re asleep, we turn off our motor controls, but when we dream we still send out signals to them. We really are trying to run, and can’t. If you feel this, and also have the not infrequent problem of being unable to distinguish waking and dreaming states, you might think that you have been paralyzed and kidnapped by aliens.
There are no aliens; there is not even a Freudian wave of guilt driving the monster. It’s just those neuromotor neurons, making the earth sticky. The best thing for people who have recurrent nightmares of this kind is to get more REM rest. “Get more sleep,” Churchland remarks. “It works.” Neurology should provide us not with sudden explanatory power but with a sense of relief from either taking too much responsibility for, or being too passive about, what happens to us. Autism is a wiring problem, not a result of “refrigerator mothers.” Schizophrenia isn’t curable yet, but it looks more likely to be cured by getting the brain chemistry right than by finding out what traumatized Gregory Peck in his childhood. Neuroscience can’t rob us of responsibility for our actions, but it can relieve us of guilt for simply being human. We are in better shape in our mental breakdowns if we understand the brain breakdowns that help cause them. This is a point that Satel and Lilienfeld, in their eagerness to support a libertarian view of the self as a free chooser, get wrong. They observe of one “brilliant and tormented” alcoholic that she, not her heavy drinking, was responsible for her problems. But, if we could treat the brain circuitry that processes the heavy drinking, we might very well leave her just as brilliant and tormented as ever, only not a drunk. (A Band-Aid, as every parent knows, is an excellent cure whenever it’s possible to use one.)
The really curious thing about minds and brains is that the truth about them lies not somewhere in the middle but simultaneously on both extremes. We know already that the wet bits of the brain change the moods of the mind: that’s why a lot of champagne gets sold on Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, if the mind were not a high-level symbol-managing device, flower sales would not rise on Valentine’s Day, too. Philosophy may someday dissolve into psychology and psychology into neurology, but since the lesson of neuro is that thoughts change brains as much as brains thoughts, the reduction may not reduce much that matters. As Montaigne wrote, we are always double in ourselves. Or, as they say on the Enterprise, it takes all kinds to run a starship. ♦
Monday, September 2, 2013
The Origin of Labor Day
Love for Labor Lost
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 1, 2013 365 Comments
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they don’t mean it.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Love For Labor Lost.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 1, 2013 365 Comments
It wasn’t always about the hot dogs. Originally, believe it or not, Labor Day actually had something to do with showing respect for labor.
Here’s how it happened: In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans.
Consider, for example, how Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, marked Labor Day last year: with a Twitter post declaring “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yep, he saw Labor Day as an occasion to honor business owners.
More broadly, consider the ever-widening definition of those whom conservatives consider parasites. Time was when their ire was directed at bums on welfare. But even at the program’s peak, the number of Americans on “welfare” — Aid to Families With Dependent Children — never exceeded about 5 percent of the population. And that program’s far less generous successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, reaches less than 2 percent of Americans.
Yet even as the number of Americans on what we used to consider welfare has declined, the number of citizens the right considers “takers” rather than “makers” — people of whom Mitt Romney complained, “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives” — has exploded, to encompass almost half the population. And the great majority of this newly defined army of moochers consists of working families that don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes (most of the rest are elderly).
How can someone who works for a living be considered the moral equivalent of a bum on welfare? Well, part of the answer is that many people on the right engage in word games: they talk about how someone doesn’t pay income taxes, and hope that their listeners fail to notice the word “income” and forget about all the other taxes lower-income working Americans pay.
But it is also true that modern America, while it has pretty much eliminated traditional welfare, does have other programs designed to help the less well-off — notably the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. The majority of these programs’ beneficiaries are either children, the elderly or working adults — this is true by definition for the tax credit, which only supplements earned income, and turns out in practice to be true of the other programs. So if you consider someone who works hard trying to make ends meet, but also gets some help from the government, a “taker,” you’re going to have contempt for a very large number of American workers and their families.
Oh, and just wait until Obamacare kicks in, and millions more working Americans start receiving subsidies to help them purchase health insurance.
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
So, this time around will we be hearing anything from Mr. Cantor and his colleagues suggesting that they actually do respect people who work for a living? Maybe. But the one thing we’ll know for sure is that they don’t mean it.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 2, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Love For Labor Lost.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Good Summary of Syria
9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to askObama’s Syria choice: Good for politics, good for the constitution, bad for SyriaMember of Congress berates Obama for consulting Congress on Syria
questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask
By Max Fisher, Published: August 29 at 12:50 pmE-mail the writer
429Comments More The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.
Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
Read the rest of our “9 questions you were too embarrassed to ask” series here
1. What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million. Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children.
2. Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children, dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.
Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.
3. That’s horrible. But there are protests lots of places. How did it all go so wrong in Syria? And, please, just give me the short version.
That’s a complicated question, and there’s no single, definitive answer. This is the shortest possible version — stay with me, it’s worth it. You might say, broadly speaking, that there are two general theories. Both start with the idea that Syria has been a powder keg waiting to explode for decades and that it was set off, maybe inevitably, by the 2011 protests and especially by the government’s overly harsh crackdown.
Before we dive into the theories, you have to understand that the Syrian government really overreacted when peaceful protests started in mid-2011, slaughtering civilians unapologetically, which was a big part of how things escalated as quickly as they did. Assad learned this from his father. In 1982, Assad’s father and then-dictator Hafez al-Assad responded to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the city of Hama by leveling entire neighborhoods. He killed thousands of civilians, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. But it worked, and it looks like the younger Assad tried to reproduce it. His failure made the descent into chaos much worse.
Okay, now the theories for why Syria spiraled so wildly. The first is what you might call “sectarian re-balancing” or “the Fareed Zakaria case” for why Syria is imploding (he didn’t invent this argument but is a major proponent). Syria has artificial borders that were created by European colonial powers, forcing together an amalgam of diverse religious and ethnic groups. Those powers also tended to promote a minority and rule through it, worsening preexisting sectarian tensions.
Zakaria’s argument is that what we’re seeing in Syria is in some ways the inevitable re-balancing of power along ethnic and religious lines. He compares it to the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, after which a long-oppressed majority retook power from, and violently punished, the former minority rulers. Most Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but the country is run by members of a minority sect known as Alawites (they’re ethnic Arab but follow a smaller branch of Islam). The Alawite government rules through a repressive dictatorship and gives Alawites special privileges, which makes some Sunnis and other groups hate Alawites in general, which in turn makes Alawites fear that they’ll be slaughtered en masse if Assad loses the war. (There are other minorities as well, such as ethnic Kurds and Christian Arabs; too much to cover in one explainer.) Also, lots of Syrian communities are already organized into ethnic or religious enclaves, which means that community militias are also sectarian militias. That would explain why so much of the killing in Syria has developed along sectarian lines. It would also suggest that there’s not much anyone can do to end the killing because, in Zakaria’s view, this is a painful but unstoppable process of re-balancing power.
The second big theory is a bit simpler: that the Assad regime was not a sustainable enterprise and it’s clawing desperately on its way down. Most countries have some kind of self-sustaining political order, and it looked for a long time like Syria was held together by a cruel and repressive but basically stable dictatorship. But maybe it wasn’t stable; maybe it was built on quicksand. Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a coup in 1970 after two decades of extreme political instability. His government was a product of Cold War meddling and a kind of Arab political identity crisis that was sweeping the region. But he picked the losing sides of both: the Soviet Union was his patron, and he followed a hard-line anti-Western nationalist ideology that’s now mostly defunct. The Cold War is long over, and most of the region long ago made peace with Israel and the United States; the Assad regime’s once-solid ideological and geopolitical identity is hopelessly outdated. But Bashar al-Assad, who took power in 2000 when his father died, never bothered to update it. So when things started going belly-up two years ago, he didn’t have much to fall back on except for his ability to kill people.
4. I hear a lot about how Russia still loves Syria, though. And Iran, too. What’s their deal?
Yeah, Russia is Syria’s most important ally. Moscow blocks the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime, which is why the United States has to go around the United Nations if it wants to do anything. Russia sends lots of weapons to Syria that make it easier for Assad to keep killing civilians and will make it much harder if the outside world ever wants to intervene.
The four big reasons that Russia wants to protect Assad, the importance of which vary depending on whom you ask, are: (1) Russia has a naval installation in Syria, which is strategically important and Russia’s last foreign military base outside the former Soviet Union; (2) Russia still has a bit of a Cold War mentality, as well as a touch of national insecurity, which makes it care very much about maintaining one of its last military alliances; (3) Russia also hates the idea of “international intervention” against countries like Syria because it sees this as Cold War-style Western imperialism and ultimately a threat to Russia; (4) Syria buys a lot of Russian military exports, and Russia needs the money.
Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. Iran is already feeling isolated and insecure; it worries that if Assad falls it will lose a major ally and be cut off from its militant proxies, leaving it very vulnerable. So far, it looks like Iran is actually coming out ahead: Assad is even more reliant on Tehran than he was before the war started.
5. This is all feeling really bleak and hopeless. Can we take a music break?
Oh man, it gets so much worse. But, yeah, let’s listen to some music from Syria. It’s really good!
If you want to go old-school you should listen to the man, the legend, the great Omar Souleyman (playing Brooklyn this Saturday!). Or, if you really want to get your revolutionary on, listen to the infectious 2011 anti-Assad anthem “Come on Bashar leave.” The singer, a cement mixer who made Rage Against the Machine look like Enya, was killed for performing it in Hama. But let’s listen to something non-war and bit more contemporary, the soulful and foot-tappable George Wassouf:
Hope you enjoyed that, because things are about to go from depressing to despondent.
6. Why hasn’t the United States fixed this yet?
Because it can’t. There are no viable options. Sorry.
The military options are all bad. Shipping arms to rebels, even if it helps them topple Assad, would ultimately empower jihadists and worsen rebel in-fighting, probably leading to lots of chaos and possibly a second civil war (the United States made this mistake during Afghanistan’s early 1990s civil war, which helped the Taliban take power in 1996). Taking out Assad somehow would probably do the same, opening up a dangerous power vacuum. Launching airstrikes or a “no-fly zone” could suck us in, possibly for years, and probably wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. An Iraq-style ground invasion would, in the very best outcome, accelerate the killing, cost a lot of U.S. lives, wildly exacerbate anti-Americanism in a boon to jihadists and nationalist dictators alike, and would require the United States to impose order for years across a country full of people trying to kill each other. Nope.
The one political option, which the Obama administration has been pushing for, would be for the Assad regime and the rebels to strike a peace deal. But there’s no indication that either side is interested in that, or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate.
It’s possible that there was a brief window for a Libya-style military intervention early on in the conflict. But we’ll never really know.
7. So why would Obama bother with strikes that no one expects to actually solve anything?
Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.
8. Come on, what’s the big deal with chemical weapons? Assad kills 100,000 people with bullets and bombs but we’re freaked out over 1,000 who maybe died from poisonous gas? That seems silly.
You’re definitely not the only one who thinks the distinction is arbitrary and artificial. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a rare opportunity, at least in theory, for the United States to make the war a little bit less terrible — and to make future wars less terrible.
The whole idea that there are rules of war is a pretty new one: the practice of war is thousands of years old, but the idea that we can regulate war to make it less terrible has been around for less than a century. The institutions that do this are weak and inconsistent; the rules are frail and not very well observed. But one of the world’s few quasi-successes is the “norm” (a fancy way of saying a rule we all agree to follow) against chemical weapons. This norm is frail enough that Syria could drastically weaken it if we ignore Assad’s use of them, but it’s also strong enough that it’s worth protecting. So it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit: firing a few cruise missiles doesn’t cost us much and can maybe help preserve this really hard-won and valuable norm against chemical weapons.
You didn’t answer my question. That just tells me that we can maybe preserve the norm against chemical weapons, not why we should.
Fair point. Here’s the deal: war is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.
So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles.
That’s why the Obama administration apparently wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria, even though it won’t end the suffering, end the war or even really hurt Assad that much.
9. Hi, there was too much text so I skipped to the bottom to find the big take-away. What’s going to happen?
Short-term maybe the United States and some allies will launch some limited, brief strikes against Syria and maybe they won’t. Either way, these things seem pretty certain in the long-term:
• The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen.
• Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.
• Russia will continue to block international action, the window for which has maybe closed anyway. The United States might try to pressure, cajole or even horse-trade Moscow into changing its mind, but there’s not much we can offer them that they care about as much as Syria.
• At some point the conflict will cool, either from a partial victory or from exhaustion. The world could maybe send in some peacekeepers or even broker a fragile peace between the various ethnic, religious and political factions. Probably the best model is Lebanon, which fought a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and has been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. It had some bombings just last week.
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