Transparent Eye

I previously did a post on I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis by Jerry White based on sample chapters that were online. I’ve now been sent the full book to review and it does live up to the good expectations set up in the introductory chapters..

White is the co-founder of Survivor Corps who lost his leg to a land mine. He’s written something that looks like a self-help book, but it feels to me that its written at a higher level than what you would expect from the genre.

Based on his own experience and the experience of others described in the book, he distills a five-point program

o Face facts
o Choose life
o Reach out
o Get moving
o Give back

I think Buddhist readers will find the book compassionate and valuable. It’s about dealing with suffering and moving beyond it. White mentions mindfulness, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Lama Surya Das. He talks about letting go of attachment to the person you were before your loss as an essential step in re-empowering yourself. The final step, giving back, is a recognition that one is no longer so needy, and you even have enough resources to share with others.

Humanists will like much of it, but be uncomfortable in spots with the light spirituality. White recommends faith and prayer, but he does not seem to believe in miracles or a God who responds to prayers in a direct way. Still, Daniel Dennett wouldn’t like his belief in belief

My hypothesis is that faith and prayer activate the reward circuits in the brain, which have a role in the placebo response. Placebo-based expectations have real, therapeutic effects on pain and depression. These are not bad things, unless they motivate you to oppress those who pray and believe differently than you do.

I see White’s message as stoic in the ancient Greek sense, where one recognizes that one has control over one’s inner state even if the outer world presents great difficulties. He quotes his wife saying, “We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change our minds about it.” That’s out of Epictetus.

Often, the word stoic is used to describe people who shut up and suffer. That is not the original sense of the term, nor what is advocated in this book. Facing facts, he says, is about letting in the pain. He does at one point quote an older woman who says that people today chatter too much about their pain, but he doesn’t seem to fully endorse that view.

He doesn’t like whining, however. He wants people to get beyond the sense of being victims. Some might find that objectionable. Some might even say that it interferes with social justice work to prevent future victims. But White’s role in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines suggests that becoming empowered does not require that one forget about injustice.

White brings up a term I had not heard of before, post-traumatic growth, as something that can happen in the wake of tragedy, especially when it gives a survivor a new sense of purpose. He also says that in his experience, grief counseling has not been very effective, an issue that has been raised elsewhere.

Overall, I feel it’s a good contribution a literature of stoicism that shows we can adjust to dire circumstances and make more from them than would normally be expected.

We had about a dozen people at the meeting today at the Andala Coffee House.

Our discussion started off with the reading, Existentialism as Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre

Pretty much everyone rejected his argument that there is no human nature because essense precedes existence.

Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.

reasoning that human nature is an expression of our genetics inheritence, and while there are individual differences, there are commonalities of human behavior that in no way depend on the existence of a god.

We are a bit more divided on the question of whether human beings are free, and Satre’s vision of freewill.

For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism–man is free, man is freedom.

We certainly have the feeling that we have the ability to freely choose between alternatives. But many people have the feeling that a god exists. Feelings don’t provide a strong basis for proving something.

People do have habitual behaviors. One of the techniques that religion uses is to drum expectations and habits into children before they know enough to question them. From habit, we act in a deterministic and stereotyped way.

But we also have the ability to override habitual behavior. From this, we can get creative. People raised in religion can break away from the teachings that were instilled in them through this ability to override habits.

But is the ability to override automatic behavior determined in a more subtle way?

No one made an argument for full determinism.

We talked about whether quantum physics could provide the basis for freewill.

A physicist in attendance gave us a quick summary of some recent thinking on quantum physics. While there has been talk, especially in New Age circles, that quantum mechanics restores freewill because consciousness is involved in resolving the superpositions of indeterminate states (see Schrödinger’s Cat ), a new view, called decoherence, is that quantum superpositions decay as they are exposed to the wider environment. It does not require consciousness to resolve the quantum state.

This resolution seems to produce random outcomes. The architecture of the brain is small enough that quantum effects could make a difference whether a neuron fires or not. So the brain may not be a deterministic device, but rather a device that produces outcomes with some randomness mixed in. This provides the basis of non-stereotyped, creative behavior. But it doesn’t allow for metaphysical freewill, since evidence that a soul or even that consciousness than affect what happens at the quantum level.

If we don’t believe in a soul or freewill, that does not mean we can’t have morality. If behavior is the result of genes and environment, having laws and prisons are environmental factors that make people behave in ways that society prefers.

We debated Sartre’s conclusion

Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

We had disagreement over whether it was religion or dogmatism that was the real problem. Non-believers in god can be dogmatic–say over whether the death penalty should be banned–but overall, believers tend to be more dogmatic.

We had one religious person amongst us, who said that it was really a matter of whether you struggle over difficult moral questions, or whether you think you have a direct channel to god or a book or authority that gives you all the answers without having to think about them.

I recommend A Murder in Lemberg, the story of rare intracommunal violence in the Jewish community in 19th century Poland. A reform rabbi was poisoned, most likely by an Orthodox Jew. The motive was probably not strictly related to the victim’s religious liberalism, but quite possibly due to institutional reforms he proposed that would have affected some commercial interests.

Lemberg was then part of the Habsburg empire and is now Lviv in Ukraine. The reform rabbi was initially favored by the Austrian authorities because he spoke German rather than Yiddish and thus had a germanizing influence on his flock. However, the rabbi proved to be a liberal in the revolutionary year of 1848, the year he was murdered. By the time the investigation of his murder took place, the authorities were favoring the orthodox community, because even if non-German speaking, they were inherently conservative and anti-revolutionary.

The author has reported a very interesting story relying on archival material that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Experts Question Using Placebo Pills to Treat Children

With the help of her husband, Dennis, she founded a placebo company, and, without a hint of irony, named it Efficacy Brands. Its chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets, Obecalp, for placebo spelled backward, goes on sale on June 1 at the Efficacy Brands Web site. Bottles of 50 tablets will sell for $5.95. The Buettners have plans for a liquid version, too.

Because they contain no active drug, the pills will not be sold as a drug under Food and Drug Administration rules. They will be marketed as dietary supplements, meaning they can be sold at groceries, drugstores and discount stores without a prescription.

“This is designed to have the texture and taste of actual medicine so it will trick kids into thinking that they’re taking something,” Ms. Buettner said. “Then their brain takes over, and they say, ‘Oh, I feel better.’ ”

Some ethicists have a problem with parents lying to their children. Not having children, I can’t comment about it. All in all, however, I think it’s admirable that the makers of this non-drug are being up front about it, as compared to the large variety of alternative therapies and herbal supplements which most scientists believe to be nothing but placebos.

Interesting article on how everthing in Egypt comes with “inshallah” and increasingly so, to ridiculous lengthls.
With a Word, Egyptians Leave It All to Fate – NYTimes.com
Plus this:

The younger Ms. Shahbendar, like many people here, have taken to using the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief, as a routine greeting. So instead of “How are you? Fine, and you?” she will say to a friend “There is no God but God,” to which the friend will complete the statement. “And Muhammad is his prophet.”

People now answer the phone that way, too, skipping hello altogether. It would be something like Christians greeting each other with “Christ is risen!” followed by “Christ will come again.” Not just on Sundays, but every day.

David Brooks – The Great Seduction by Debt – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Sixty-two scholars have signed on to a report by the Institute for American Values and other think tanks called, “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture,” examining the results of all this.

I admire the productive aspects of capitalism, but the advertising industry, and its production of desire and craving, is I think largely destructive. Basic informational advertising is fine, but most advertising is propagandistic and exploits weak points in human cognition rather than presenting accurate information to be weighed properly.

It’s a shame that the Internet has become an advertising-dependent medium. It wasn’t clear this would happen 10 years ago, when micropayments were bruited about. But people hate to apy up front, and don’t realize that they are paying in the long run.

The color codes can get confusion for the uninitiated, but I think the analysis in Rafi Nasser’s article describing the civic levels of Israeli and Palestinian society is on the ball. He optimistically thinks that the growth of Hamas over the gangsterish Fatah may be a step forward in the evolution of Palestinian society, as fundamentalism is more universalistic than tribalism. If so, it will probably take a generation or so for that shift to bear fruit in a step beyond fundamentalism, and in the meantime it will continue to be rough going.

The architect of 9/11 on cultural liberalism

“I consider all American constitution” evil, he said, because it permits “same-sexual marriage and many other things that are very bad,” he told the military judge, Col. Ralph Kohlmann. “Do you understand?”