Beyond Rivalry

On Oprah today, regular guest and cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz and neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor will be talking about what a stroke feels like and what's happening in your brain when you have a stroke. Taylor's book about her stroke is My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (2008). You can watch her TED talk about her stroke online.

Dr. Taylor offers a few exercises to help us make the choice to be peaceful and joyful. Here are two:

>> Pay attention to the energy that other people bring to you. Realize that you can observe other people and interact with them without engaging with their energy. Write about a time when someone else's energy affected you in a negative way. Consider how different the situation might have turned out if you had chosen to observe rather than be engaged and swept away by their energy. How might you approach the exact same situation in the future?

>> Brain circuits are very predictable and consistent entities. The more time you spend thinking a thought, then the stronger that circuit becomes and the less outside energy it takes for that circuit to run. As a result, for many of us, our brains run constantly with brain chatter,  and loops of thoughts go around and around in our minds. Pay attention to what is going on inside your brain. Journal about the thoughts that seem to go around and around that make you unhappy, angry or uncomfortable. Recognize that you have the power to choose not to think these thoughts by choosing to think about other things.

Identify something that your mind obsesses about that you would rather not spend so much time thinking about and document three different things that you can purposefully choose to replace in your mind when those thoughts come up. Create this list for yourself so you can arm yourself with alternative circuits to run in your mind when the time arises. Learn to 'tend the garden' of your mind in this way.

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

Explore until someone yells at you.

- Dr. David L. Hall, (dean, Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology)

***

Prudence prevents us from following our passions, overruns our intuition, and gives us the illusion of being virtuous when life is asking us to explore territory lying beneath the horizon of virtue.

-- Thomas Moore

Has it?

(fmi)

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, and here.)

The focus of Chapter 5, Method, Evidence and Truth, is evidence, and what kind of evidence or proof is needed for mimetic theory. If you are already convinced that mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism operate basically as Girard has posited, then this chapter is probably skippable. Otherwise, it's interesting for its exploration of 'detective novel' evidence -- indirect, and often hidden or muddied by the perpetrator -- and its suggested similarity to Girard's evidence.

The Darwin quote that introduces the chapter speaks for my response to mimetic theory:

"What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained." (in Darwin's Autobiography)

** Concerning evidence and proof:

For Girard, it is the "multiplicity of consistent elements that constitutes proof."

I would say that a preponderance of consistent indirect evidence may not prove a theory (though it can convict a person in a court of law) but it is highly suggestive and should be taken seriously.

Girard seems both baffled and irritated that "modern intellectuals" either don't grasp, don't take seriously, or don't accept mimetic theory even as a hypothesis to be proved or disproven:

"Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder. One has the same plot in the Bible with Cane (Genesis 4) or in Livy's account of the origins of Rome. Mircea Eliade talks about what he calls the 'creative murder,' which can be found in myths from the Middle East, as well as from China and beyond. However, so far as my work is concerned, I am still accused of simply rehashing an old Freudian idea. It seems that some scholars aren't able to see how overwhelming the evidence is! ... Why do so many scholars dismiss the founding murder as insanity, instead of accepting it at least a hypothesis?" 

Anthropologist A.M. Hocart's work, Kings and Councillors (1936), is invoked and discussed quite a bit. Girard says, "According to [Hocart], anthropological evidence is always indirect, circumstantial, like a clue in a detective story. If we isolate these clues, we cannot reach any final verdict, but they are so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears."

Hocart also speaks of Darwin's evolution theory: "[H]aving been converted by comparative evidence, they set out to find direct evidence in order to confirm their deductions ...."

Girard comments on this, saying that this passage (of which I've selected only a sentence) "shows that in the theory of evolution, not only was the circumstantial evidence decisive but it also allowed the finding of the direct evidence, which now seems essential. The same thing happens with mimetic theory. There is no direct evidence for the apparently fantastic claim that the foundational murder is real and universal." Several times in the book, Girard encourages forensic anthropologists to find direct evidence of his theory.

On the same theme of the reluctance of most scholars to even entertain mimetic theory, Girard suggests that "the real obstacle in the case of the mimetic theory hasn't simply been the incompleteness of the record but the unwillingness an inability of our world to question its own fundamental assumptions."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he says, "the general ambition, apart from a few exceptions, was to show that Christianity was a myth like any other. In a way, we could say that I renew that project. However, I do in reverse, because I realize that it is Christianity that reads mythology better than any anthropologist, and allows us for the first time to unmask the mimetic mechanism and, particularly, the nature of the scapegoat murder."

Asked a bit later if he's saying that to understand mimetic theory we have to acknowledge our own mimetism, he responds, "Yes.  There cannot be any positivistic separation between observer and the object of observation: we are all implicated in the mechanism. The mimetic theory demands an 'existential understanding' to be fully grasped."

Further: "Borrowing from Freud's terminology, I would say that the mimetic theory is a 'narcissistic wound.' It is a wound to narcissism per se, for it shows that one's desire isn't as free as modern individualism would like it to be; and it is also a wound to the traditional theories of culture, for it clearly states that the beginnings of human culture were grounded in a founding murder."

"In this context, conversion means accepting the mimetic nature of desire. Otherwise, one would fall back on the old authentic/inauthentic binary opposition, which is the perspective of mimetic desire that hasn't been acknowledged as such. The 'inauthentic' person is the one who follows directives from others, whereas the 'authentic' is the person who desires autonomously. We have already seen how misleading and illusory this sort of individualism is. The only way to overcome it is through a conversion, which ultimately leads to a revision of one's own religious belief."

Girard suggests that "one of the reasons it's so hard to present evidence is mimetic theory" is that "evidence is hidden through the unconsciousness," yet "the fact that evidence has been erased may work as a super-proof, a meta-evidence because it shows the crucial importance of the element that has been erased. If someone removes the traces of a murder, it means he is strongly implicated in it. ... I'm convinced that there is a real event, which is hidden, covered up, traces of which are erased. Nonetheless, in a Freudian sense, this erasing of the traces isn't itself without traces."

Girard agrees with his questioners that "misrecognition in modern times" may be a defence against "the threat of overt self-criticism that would bring about the collapse of the individual identity and its convictions." He says, "I think you are right, because so much effort goes into preserving concepts such as individualism and the autonomy of desire."

** Religion is rational:

Girard sees religion as very rational: "In sociobiological terms, it has an extremely powerful adaptive value."

** Literature v. Science

There's some mention of the 'two cultures' of literature and science -- it's suggested that Girard "transformed literature into a scientific instrument of enquiry" -- and of which has primacy in describing human relationships. That reminded me of this NPR story over the weekend about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, titled "Virginia Woolf at the intersection of science and art." It's very pertinent to the discussion.

** Speaking of the 'truth of texts':

"I do believe in the truth of the text. I do not think all texts are truthful, but I believe, exactly like Freud, that ritual necessarily imitates an event which actually occurred. In its narrative, myth necessarily distorts that same event, but in such a way that the principle of the distortion can be discovered. To say that I simply mistake ritual and myth for the truth is a gross simplification of my work. I'm not talking about an absolute truth of the text, and I'm only saying that there is something hidden in the text, which refers to an actual event: the scapegoat mechanism."

Next: Chapter 6, The Scandal of Christianity

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, and here.)

Chapter 4, Dialogues and Criticism: From Frazier to Lévi-Strauss, is the shortest chapter. It's primarily a clarification of Girard's influences and a discussion of religion vs. science or scientific method.

Among possible influences mentioned (and mostly discarded) are anthropologist and myth researcher James Frazer, sociologist Gabriel Tarde, sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, classics scholar Walter Burkert, and Christian philosopher and activist Simone Weil.

My notes:

** Political Correctness and Bias (more on this in the next chapter as well)

"The main difference between contemporary anthropology and my work is that I claim that all cultures scapegoat and victimize someone, while it is fashionable to say that only Western culture did that. If one talks about ritual killing in the Amazon, it is seen as a pure fancy of Western prejudice."

** What I see as the craziness of academic bickering: Scapegoating the object!

Girard is asked how he responds to  Bruno Latour, who "claims that you are doing away with the object and in some sense you are 'scapegoating' it. He answers, "Latour wants to make me anti-objectal..."  Anti-objectal? LOL   Anyway, his answer is that it's only during the peak of the escalation of mimetic crisis that the object disappears; "otherwise it is always there."

** Some people have wondered how Girard can believe both in God and in science. Girard responds:

"I do not see why God cannot be compatible with science. If one believes in God, one also believes in objectivity. A traditional belief in God makes one a believer in the objectivity of the world.  ... I still operate within a traditional epistomology, which considers things as real and sees God as the guarantor of that reality. Therefore, I do not understand why it should pose a problem to discuss my theory within a scientific framework." 

He says a bit later that "Readers do not realize how unphilosophical I am, and [they don't realise] the fact that I have been guided by the idea of contributing to ... a science of human relationships, always starting from actual and real human relationships, moving away from the 'myth' of the all-powerful subject."

Others have criticised Girard for not writing simply as a Christian apologist rather than within the methodology of social science. He feels, rightly I think, that "to postulate the a priori truth of religion from the start, your reasoning would have a far weaker apologetic value. The mimetic theory has an apologetic value in terms of Christianity only if you assume all restrictions of knowledge of the scientific attitude."

Still, I think the question of bias will always remain, because Girard is a Christian. What he's trying to do seems akin to journalists, who of course have their own opinions, trying to report objectively what they observe, or for that matter like the task of all scientists, who also have their own beliefs about how things work, why and how they're here, and so on, and who nonetheless experiment and analyse experiment results with as much objectivity as they can muster (helped by critique, peer review, etc.). We are all to some extent subjects, exerting subjective influence on what we hypothesise, study, conclude, etc. 

Related to this is the final question in this chapter, about Michael Serres' view that critical thinking is shot through with violence: "In his view we have to renounce the inner violence of cultural progress as conceived in modern Western philosophy. To 'criticize' and to 'discriminate' are acts of expulsion, of division, of scapegoating."

Girard, while sympathetic to this rendering of mimetic theory, doesn't feel the same. He says that "there should be some critique of the subject: it does not have to be total negation. ... I have to say that, personally, polemic does not trouble me much. If I am treated polemically, I will respond accordingly. It is true that it is a phenomenon of doubles, but I think it preferable to total silence. If you do not discriminate, you cannot distinguish, and to start thinking, you have to learn to distinguish. ... The more we speak about dialogue in our time, the less we seem to practise it. Being polemical means acknolwedging the existence of the other as one who does not think like me. But going back to Serres' position: it is clear that we are still in a critical world. There are aspects of our culture that we cannot transcend; we are circumscribed by our limitations. But, ultimately, I don't see this as an issue of great importance."

My position is somewhat in between Serres', as represented here, and Girard's (also as represented here).  "Polemic" is derived from the Greek word polemos, or war, and it speaks of a hostile attack or refutation of another. By that definition, I think it may be better to keep silence than to speak in this way. To adopt a cliche, "Ideas don't attack, people do," which is to say that a nasty personal attack can be cloaked as simply a 'difference of opinion,' accompanied by contempt and derision. Defending a belief position with persistence and tenacity may be warranted at times; defending it with hostility, or attacking another in order to defend it, seems to imply a kind of egotism, as well as an unawareness of the doubles phenomenon Girard speaks of.

Another understanding of polemic, though, is "the art or practice of disputation or controversy;" speaking and acting in a controversial manner at times seems to me part and parcel of living, conversing, thinking, feeling passionately. I disagree with Serres that criticism and discrimination are in themselves acts of expulsion, division, or scapegoating, but I think they often can be used for this purpose. On the other hand, I like what Girard says about argument as an acknowledgement of the other who is not me and who doesn't agree with me, and I think that signal has tremendous potential for openness and learning.

This all reminds me of the tension I feel in Buddhism concerning 'opinion' and 'belief'  -- on the one hand, as Pema Chödrön has said, "holding on to beliefs [or opinions] limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems" and on the other hand, Buddhists from the Dalai Lama to Chödrön to the Buddhist-on-the-street continue to strongly hold opinions, act on them, and express them with vigor and enthusiasm to others. 

The NYT Magazine is running an article this weekend titled "Malwebolence," about internet 'trolls' who enjoy causing harm to others, either because it's just fun -- they speak of "the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium" while "you chat with friends and laugh" -- or perhaps because they have the notion that they are helping others learn how to handle explosives by blowing them up in their faces. One troll says his passion is 'pushing peoples' buttons' and he "frames his acts of trolling as ... sociological inquiries into human behavior." He also says: "'It's not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I'm trying to save them.'" It seems fairly obvious through the article that this particular troll is trying to save himself, as well, though it may be too late: "'Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone's life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I've been through horrible stuff, too.' 'Like what?' I asked. Sexual abuse, [he] said." At age 5 he was molested by his grandfather [his mother confirms this] and three other relatives.

The article's author, Mattathias Schwartz, asks his readers at one point:

"Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying 'uncle'? Is the effort to control what's said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?"

Free speech may be one issue to consider; it's not what immediately interests me reading this article. My interest is primarily in the proliferation (or so it's asserted) of mob violence online, what motivates and triggers it, and how it proceeds. As Schwartz says, attempting to respond to his own free speech query:

"Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It's tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. ... But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly -- a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that's a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There's a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well."

Online mob violence, imo, is no different from in-your-face mob violence except perhaps, as Schwartz points out, it's considerably facilitated by anonymity and breadth of coverage. But the motivations, the triggers, and the process are the same in either case.

That 'trolling' is highly mimetic and is often mob violence is evidenced several times in the article:

• The Internet is "a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others." Yet another way to explore and  express who we are, vs. everyone else, through blogging perhaps more than through message boards, at least as the boards are used by most people.

• "Trolling has evolved [perhaps the wrong term] from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt." "Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well."

• The victims are seem as utterly deserving of their fate, complicit in it, inviting it -- "You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you" -- as is shown in this interchange between a troll and Schwartz:
  

"'You have green hair,' he told me. 'Did you know that?'
"'No,' I said.
"'Why not?'
"'I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.'
"'That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you're a terrible reporter.'
"'What do you mean? What did I do?'
"'That's a very interesting reaction,' [he] said. 'Why didn't you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?' "
If I were certain that I wasn't a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling 'victims' to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it."  

Another troll put it even more bluntly and graphically:

 

"'Trolling is basically Internet eugenics. ... I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. ... We need to put these people in the oven!'"

 

No one else is seen as innocent, therefore no one else is seen as a true victim and no one is seen as a perpetrator. Everyone else is seen as deserving of destruction at the hands of trolls, who, in some cases, see themselves as performing a meritorious service.

• That same troll implied that the mob (or a segment of it) is ripe for a leader and is waiting for a sign:

"'We're waiting,' [he] said. 'We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.'
"'How do you know it's not you?' I asked.
"'If it were me, I would know,' he said. 'I would receive a sign.'
"Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, [he] said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction." 

Beyond the indications of mob violence and mimesis, there's also an indication of antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy) -- an individual personality disorder, quite apart from the group phenomenon of mob violence -- in some of their comments about what's right and wrong, though even these might be echoed (often not out loud) by 'normal' people. It's the rationale, the feelings (or lack thereof) and the destructive actions, unchecked by any sense of true compassion for others, that together paint a particularly disturbing and illuminating picture:

"I asked [one troll] whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, [he] argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. 'I can't push you into the fire,' he explained, 'but I can look at you while you're burning in the fire and not be required to help.' [Metaphorically, though, according to this article some trolls have pushed some people into the fire -- their actions, usually en masse, have contributed to the deaths, job losses and relationship losses of others. They haven't simply sat passively by. They've set the fire, fanned it and then watched others struggle and writhe. Examples in the article.]

Asked "Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn't be done?," he didn't have an answer.

Another troll justified his desire to "kill four [billion] of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible" with his fear that "we are headed for a Malthusian crisis."  (He's the one who said he's waiting for a messiah.)

On the heels of research indicating that we're more lenient on ourselves than on others when it comes to assigning tasks and judging fairness, there comes this report:

"In a report titled 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,' which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces."

Stuart Buck at Overcoming Bias looks at the overarching theme of bias in Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories [published as The Diet Delusion in the UK], "a book of some 600 pages (nearly 70 of which are the bibliography). ...

"Why is Taubes so interested in bias?  For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer.  Judging from Taubes' exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored)."

Examples follow, including that dietary researchers ignored or suppressed "studies showing that diet, cholesterol, and heart disease were not even correlated ... or even that low cholesterol raises other risks of death."

Taubes' contention, by the way, is that heart disease and other "diseases of civilization" are more likely caused by high triglyceride levels, which are elevated by eating refined carbohydrates.

In a January 2008 interview with the Telegraph, he admits "that he himself might be biased: 'What are the chances of writing an article that says the entire medical establishment is wrong, and them going, "Good point, thank you, Gary. Can we give you an award?" When people challenge the establishment, 99.9 per cent of the time they are wrong. If I was writing about me, I'd begin from the assumption that I am both wrong and a quack.' ... 'I have a friend who says that, if I'm wrong, I will have to live in Argentina with all the other mass murderers."

(Is that a real cat in the photo??)

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008): 

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony....  [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years. 

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

>> Impossible Experiments  (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes."  (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?)  Other never-done experiments.

>>  "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

>>  Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?"  Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

>>  "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too.  Full study (7 pages, PDF).

>>  "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should. 

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...) 

Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.

One researcher's results:

"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.

"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."

Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure." 

René Girard and others (particularly, and excellently, James Alison in this post-9/11 essay) talk a lot about how humans use the act of sacralising something or someone -- grief, death, a victim, violence, etc. -- to justify the thing or the one, to make it beyond reproach, to give meaning to a meaningless act, to create unanimity and excitement, and primarily and purposefully, to confer to ourselves by association with the transcendent a heightened sense of identity, stability, and worthiness.

Eric Gans explains the relatonships between sacrifice and 'making sacred': "The word sacrifice contains within itself the paradox of culture. Etymologically to make sacred (sacer + facio), it means both to renounce and to kill. Culture is about renouncing and making sacred, but it is also about killing in the service of these ends."

With this in mind, I was interested to read this in The Economist today, in an article about how science is seeking to explain religious belief as beneficial in an evolutionary framework (the entire article is chock full of intriguing studies and conclusions):

"Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on." [Non-Orthodox Christian or Jewish Americans might find it difficult to understand how practicising one's religion incurs short-term costs ... ]

"On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

 

"To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

 

"A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

"As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."

Other studies mentioned in the article corroborate the idea that, perhaps, belief in a supernatural being (whether it's G-d or a ghost, as in some studies) creates coherence and a sense of security among group members, and leads to increased cooperation, collaboration, and sharing among members of the group. This seems to accord with the Girardian thought that 'making sacred' is a way to create unanimity, stability, shared identity. It says nothing of the possible cost, which Alison addresses in his essay, talking about the response of many to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 11 Sept. 2001:

"And immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create meaning. ... As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The 'tremendum et fascinosum,' as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. ... The old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. ... Phrases began to appear to the effect that 'We're all Americans now' -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us [in London]. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero....

 

"And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like 'to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.'

 

"And there was fear. Fear of more to come. Fear that it could be me next time. ... Fear and disorientation in a new world order. Not an entirely uncomfortable fear, the fear that goes with a satanic show. Part of the glue which binds us into it. A fear not unrelated to excitement.

 

"What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic. ...

 

"When I say satanic, I mean this in two senses .... The first sense is the sense I have just described: the fantastic pomp and work of sacrificial violence leading to an impression of unanimity, the same lie from the one who was a murderer and liar from the beginning, the same lie behind all human sacrifices, all attempts to create social order and meaning out of a sacred space of victimization. But the second sense is more important: the satanic is a lie that has been undone. It has been undone by Jesus's going to death exploding from within the whole world of sacrifice, of religion and culture based on death, and showing it has no transcendence at all. ... The pomp has nothing to do with heaven. It has nothing to do with God."

Obviously, religious communes like those referenced in the Economist article are likely not overflowing with pomp and cathartic grief. A religious commune, or religious order, may well survive not by any contrived sense of unanimity and feverish excitement borne of co-opted tragic grief -- after all, that unanimity and excitement doesn't last, and to believe that they do is to believe the lie -- but perhaps they are characterised more often rather by true transcendence, true cooperation and compassion, a unity achieved through struggle rather than unanimity. The similarity I see between the religious communes, as briefly described in the article, and the response to 9/11 that Alison is talking about, is the simple action of making meaning by referencing the sacred and transcendent, and even by actually making sacrifices (or feeling that one is making them), in an effort to feel, by association, that one has value.

As Alison has said, and points out later again in his essay in examining a passage in Luke 13, it's so very easy to feel justified and morally good when we ally ourselves with the transcendent, to adopt a dualistic viewpoint, to see others who differ from us as bad, as 'them,' as 'other.' It's so easy to think that I am privileged and valuable, because of my experience with the transcendent, in a way that you are not. That my life has meaning in a way that yours doesn't.

Alison again:

[I]f we are caught up in the world of giving sacred meanings, then we will be caught up in the world of reciprocal violence, of good and bad measured over against other people, and we will likewise perish. Once again I stress: Jesus [in Luke 13:1-5, and in Mark 13:1ff] will not be drawn into adding to meaning. He merely asks those who come to him themselves to move out of the world of sacred-seeming meaning. What does it mean for us to learn to look at the world through those eyes? ... 

 

"Jesus not only taught us to look away, not to allow ourselves to be seduced by the satanic. He also acted out what the undoing of the satanic meant: he was so powerful that he was able to lose to its need to sacrifice so as to show that it was entirely unnecessary. We are so used to describing Jesus's cross and resurrection as a victory -- a description taken from the military hardware store of satanic meaning -- that we easily forget that what that victory looked like was a failure. So great is the power behind Jesus's teaching and self-giving that he was able to fail, thus showing once and for all that 'having to win,' the grasping on to meaning, success, reputation, life and so on is of no consequence at all. Death could not hold him in, because he was held in being by one for whom death does not exist, is not even the sort of rival who might be challenged to a duel which someone might win. But if death can only get meaning by having victory, if the order of sacred violence can only have meaning if it matters to us to survive, to be, to feel good, at the expense of someone, then someone for whom it doesn't matter to lose is someone who is playing its game on totally different terms, and its potential for giving meaning collapses.

 

"Here is where I am heading: We can imagine in the abstract something of the power which has nothing to do with death. What is much more difficult is imagining that power incarnated in a human heart and eyes looking at this world. Yet that is what we are talking about. A human heart and eyes so utterly held by the Creator that they speak the Creator's heart about this world. And not just in word, but by a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it, thus enabling creation to be unsnarled from our truncation of it into a violent perversion and trap.

 

"Now this is what I find difficult. The heart, the desire, that wants to do something like that. What does it want? Why should it do it? Why not leave us to get on with it, stuck in our charades, thinking the world of our meaning and our death? In other words, the very fact of distracting us, by word and deed from being involved in what Merton rightly called 'pseudo events' suggests a desire for us to be something else. The eye that is teaching us to look away from the lure of the sacred is powered by a heart that wants us to be something else. And we learn our desire through the eye of another. Our learning to see through Jesus' eyes will eventually result in us desiring with Jesus' heart -- which is to say, our receiving the mind of Christ. ...

 

"Jesus not only teaches us to look away, but models what living from utterly non-rivalistic creative power for which death is not, looks like. There is a desire in this. A desire for us not to be trapped in death. And this is where I think I'm going -- something apparently terribly banal, but I think, of earth shattering significance. The person who teaches us to look away and models for us another way of desiring actually likes us. It is only possible to imagine doing something like that for someone you actually like. And Jesus is doing it for all of us who are caught up in the sacred lie -- which is to say, all of us.

 

"The staggering thing that this means, for me, is that the most extraordinary fruit of contemplation in the shadow of the violence which we are experiencing is this: God likes us. All of us. God likes me and I like being liked. It has nothing to do with whether we are bad or good, indeed, he takes it for granted that we are all more or less strongly tied up in the sacred lie. In teaching after teaching he makes the same point: all are invited, bad and good. Those are our categories, part of the problem not part of the solution, not God's category. God's 'category' for us is 'created' and 'created' means 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfilment, fruition to, to share in just being.' We are missing out on something huge and powerful and serene and enjoyable and safe and meaningful by being caught up in something less than that, an ersatz perversion of each of those things. And because God likes us he wants us to get out of our addiction to the ersatz so as to become free and happy. "

Make sure to celebrate by using Google's Custom Time. (And check out their past innovations.) 

Also, How Stuff Works: How the Air Force One Hybrid Works 

Obsolete Skills, which is a wiki (edited by anyone who wants to, whether they are experts on the topic or complete dolts), not only lists them but describes some obsolete, almost-obsolete, and perhaps debatably obsolete skills in lucid detail. Not all of them, though. And some (q.v. previous link) aren't all that obsolete, which is sometimes acknowledged. Many are computer-related, but not all.

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky offers a sequence of numbers (1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...) and considers the order inherent in it. He considers that one might try to impose order on the sequence, insisting on "neatness and elegance when there isn't any there."

He goes on, speaking of the elegant, inherent order of math, in words that seem to me to apply to many aspects of life (or am I forcing the analogy?):

"Someone who grasped too quickly at order, who demanded closure right now, who forced the pattern, might never find the stable level.  If you tweak the table of first differences to make them "more even", fit your own conception of aesthetics before you found the math's own rhythm, then the second differences and third differences will come out wrong.  Maybe you won't even bother to take the second differences and third differences.  Since, once you've forced the first differences to conform to your own sense of aesthetics, you'll be happy -- or you'll insist in a loud voice that you're happy.

"None of this says a word against - gasp! - reductionism.  The order is there, it's just better-hidden.  [T]he moral is to reduce at the right time, to wait for an opening before you slice, to not prematurely terminate the search for beauty.  So long as you can refuse to see beauty that isn't there, you have already taken the needful precaution if it all turns out ugly."

I know I have experience forcing the pattern, not waiting for the opening but ripping my own with the jagged tools of my preconceptions, assumptions, expectations, blurry vision, distracted listening. I have not listened to the inherent rhythm, I have missed finding the stable place. I've done it when frustratedly working math tests (SATs, GREs, etc.) and I've done it in lots of other non-math ways -- the details are missing from my consciousness but the memory of the feeling of the forced false pattern, and the knowledge of the instability underlying it, lingers ...