W.E.I.R.D. Science — and Ethics and Politics

            The joke on campus when I was "in the academy" was that our colleagues in the Psych Biz had given us (largely) the psychology of the American college sophomore. American and other academic psychologists are starting to take the joke more seriously, trying to figure out how to adjust to having a subject pool from backgrounds that are largely W.E.I.R.D.: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Most people in the world are not WEIRD; indeed, large numbers of Americans don't hit all those elements. Among the majority of people — historically a substantial majority — the "R" wouldn't be "Rich" but "Religious (more or less)."

            Being oblivious to religion can have results ranging from silly to disastrous.

            Local example: Southern California Edison Electric Company scheduled a power outage for my neighborhood for 10 PM Saturday, 15 April 2017, through 6 AM on the 16th. Sunday, 16 April 2017 was Easter Sunday, and apparently the schedulers at SoCal Edison were ignorant of the custom among many Ventura County natives to have family and friends over for Easter eating and would have refrigerators loaded with food that weekend, in some cases too much food to tolerate up to 8 hours without power — if everything went well during the maintenance work and to say nothing about having a crew working extra hours on Easter weekend.

            So come on, SoCal Ed! There'd be an excuse if you had to calculate on your own Easter's falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. But you don't; nowadays you check a calendar a month or so after you spot Easter stuff sprouting up at Kroger's or six weeks after those dumb-ass Cadbury Crème Egg commercials start showing up on television.

            California Christians can't complain about persecution, but there's definitely insensitivity, indifference, and ignorance.

            More significant example: No plan for "peace in the Mideast" will work that assumes that Jerusalem is just a city and that the key issues in the conflicts are rational interests in land, water, resources generally and so forth— and ignores religion, ethnic identities, self-respect, and self-respect's sinful sibling, Pride.

            Significant for capital "D" Democrats in the United States: No plan to regain majority-party power — not membership or sympathies or numbers in polling, but power — will work unless it gets more people to vote Democratic who are Western(ized)/White or White-ish, schooled a bit but not overly Educated, recently de-industrialized, and far less Rich by world standards than Religious.

            So come on, Democrats! You should know this stuff at least for the Abrahamic religions — and if you're culturally educated, not just schooled, you should know which ones the "Abrahamic religions" are. For example: in the Hebrew Bible, the 24^th Psalm begins, "The Earth is the Eternal's, and all that it contains, / The sea and all that dwell therein; / For He has founded it upon the ocean, and upon the flood." The psalmist assumes a labor theory of property: something is yours if you make it, with your labor, not as an investment or because you're Pharaoh ordering around forced labor by your peasants in the off-season, and slaves. And from there you can go on to the Prophets on social justice and, explicitly with Christians, indirectly with others get to the parts on basic decency spelled out in Matthew 25.

            We are all "values" voters, and if people accept those basics on our absolute human duties — and Jews, Christians, and Muslims damn well should — you ought to be able to get them to vote those values.

Relationships, Political Debate ... and Basic Skills (12 Jan. 2013)

           During the era of the audiocassette, at the time of the great flourishing of the American 12-Step movement — probably some time in the 1980s — a bootleg tape circulated of an address to a 12-Step conference by a psychologist who'd been asked to talk about relationships.

            Relationships were a hot topic in the last third or so of the 20^th century, with a lot of people complaining of having problems forming and maintaining serious relationships.

            So the psychologist had been asked to give a talk for a lay audience, but a knowledgeable one, on relationships.

            As I recall the tape, the psychologist wasn't going to deal with whether or not there'd been an increase in problems of relationship, nor with sophisticated analyses of what might cause those problems and how to cure them. He asked instead what abilities might be required to maintain a relationship and decided that one obvious one was the ability to carry on a serious, intimate conversation.

            Then he asked what basic skills might be required to have an intimate conversation.

            Most basically, a person would need to figure out what he was feeling — the speaker was male, and I'm male, so let's gender the pronouns male here — and put that perception into words for himself. Then he'd have to express those feelings to the other person, and then shut up and listen, really listen, to the other's response, and then recycle, starting with feelings elicited by the other's words.

            And so on for a number of exchanges.

            The research the speaker had seen indicated that these skills were somewhat like language: not that they were hard-wired in the way language acquisition is — unless your early years are in a totally pathological situation you will learn a human language — but that they were something one "picked up" from one's family and early peer group, and it was just possible that if one didn't "pick them up" at an early age, learning them later could be difficult. (Few adults can "pick up" a foreign language; we have to work to learn it.)

            And how many Americans were picking up those skills effectively, how many families were, so to speak, teaching them well? He said the best guesses were about 20%. By the time we reach adolescence or adulthood, about 20% of Americans have strong competence in the skills necessary to carry on an intimate conversation, to do a good job talking about their feelings.

            Which means that some 80% of Americans have less-than-stellar down to downright poor command of the basic skills needed for a serious conversation about feelings, maybe serious conversations, period: at least serious conversations on topics about which, as we say, people feel strongly.

            For a couple or three years after hearing that bootleg tape, I asked every clinical psychologist I talked to what they thought about the analysis. To the last shrink, they agreed that, if anything, the statistics were optimistic; they felt that far fewer than 20% of Americans were skilled at having an intimate conversation and that large numbers weren't good at all.

            Okay, this would be an unreliable sample: shrinks tend to see people not doing well with relationships. Still, even allowing for pessimistic shrinks overgeneralizing from their experiences — even allowing here a hefty "plus or minus __ per cent" — even so, there's a fair possibility that a lot of Americans have trouble with relationships for the very simple reason that we have trouble talking about them.
            And the situation may be more serious than that observation indicates.

            First, if this analysis holds, it's quite possible that things have gotten better the last generation or so but unlikely that improvements will come quickly. If your parents weren't good at intimate conversation, it's a skill you'll probably have to learn later in life — learn with difficulty — and if you don't, it's likely to be a skill you'll won't hand down to your children. Etc. over the generations.

            Second, more may be involved here than touchy-feely couples relationship and family dynamics.

            During the same era as the speech to the 12-Step conference, Professor Michael Moffatt was occasionally living among and studying Rutgers University undergraduates and eventually reporting his findings in Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989).

            Moffatt found "some classic, old-fashioned America anti-intellectuals among the undergraduates at Rutgers" and noted that the term "bull session" for a rambling talk about deep things was unknown to his informants; but the students Moffatt studied claimed "that the now-unlabeled college 'bull session' was still alive and well at Rutgers in the late twentieth century." That Moffatt hadn't observed one would likely be because his dorm-mates "had probably not wanted a known professor listening in on their private intellectual forays." In self-reports from 1986, however, the students said they had serious conversations "all the time among themselves" (298-99).

            Significantly, however, they also said that "they usually did this talk quietly and intimately, with one or two friends." Moffatt notes, " in fact, a certain an analogy between sex and mind in the assumptions of the students. The expression of your real, honest mentality, like that of your real sexuality, could make you vulnerable among your peers. [* * *] As with sex talk, so, too, with mind talk: the safest place to do it was outside the hearing of the dorm peer-group — very late at night in the lounge with just a few friends, or in your room or a friend's room, or elsewhere" off the dorm floor (299).

            Two related points here.

            First, as a teacher in the 1980s intio the 2000s, I probably erred in casually asking students in a classroom, "Well, OK, but what do you think about that — what are your feelings on the subject?" For my students, divulging one's real thoughts and feelings might have been a highly personal matter.

            More relevant here, what if discussing emotionally-charged political issues is close to intimate discussion, and if many Americans lack not only background knowledge, basic information, and training in logical argument, but also lack basic skills in discussing just how they feel about a public topic?

            What if, especially, many Americans lack skill and practice in that move of shutting up and really listening to what the other person is saying — and the following move of pausing to determine just how we feel about the other person's comments: that thoughtful, "in-feeling" pause before mouthing off ourselves?

            It's possible that since the 1980s "The Politics of Feeling" have become more respectable, simultaneous with increasing acceptance of "letting it all hang out" in public, perhaps even an expectation of public emoting. It is possible that since the 1980s politics in America have become a paradoxically public "intimate discussion," often carried about by people who lack the skills for such discussions.

            The issue will be in and out of the news, but I wouldn't expect rapid improvement in Americans' handling of our personal relationships. And I see with the now-anonymous 12-Step spearer's analysis yet another reason to be pessimistic on improvements in American public debate.


            Many of us not only lack the skills for important conversations but don't even know we need them. 

California Dreamin' — Censoring What You Say About It (24 May 2013)

          It was several small masscres ago — about the time when I started thinking seriously about moving to California — and the General Assembly of the Golden State reacted to the demand to DO SOMETHING!!! about gun violence by adding another requirement for shrinks to report to police authorities on their, the shrinks', conversations with their clients.

          "Well," I thought, "if I ever have to talk to a professional in California about mental issues, I'll stick to a lawyer or priest."

         Professional conversations with lawyers and priests are still privileged, even in California, and I sincerely hope Church authorities have kept up, or will soon return to, the old custom of burning at the stake priests who violate the seal of confession. And you can add to the pyre lawyers who tattle on their clients.

         Or, if that seems extreme, perhaps just defrocking priests and disbarring lawyers and banishing them from respectable society.

         You see, I probably should never talk to a California shrink, possibly to no one in the mental health biz, because I say things like my hoping for burning at the stake priests — or lawyers or shrinks — who finque on their clients.

         I sometimes write with violent imagery and sometimes "image" (briefly) baroquely unpleasant outcomes for people who annoy me.

         Although I may not do this as often as most people.

         I declined to see Zero Dark Thirty (2013) because of its torture scene(s), and I've never seen a a Texas Chainsaw remake. (For professional reasons, I had to watch the original Chainsaw and the original Saw and that will do me for that series.) Indeed, I felt compelled to caution one younger colleague when we compared notes on having courses micromanaged by a council of busybodies at our university: he talked about fantasizing walking into one of their meetings with a flamethrower, and I chided him for lacking in his imaginings the personal touch. "A Sarah-Connor-style pump-action shotgun," I said. "You get satisfying imagined splatter while respecting individuality."

         Long before that, a colleague my own age asked me how I could sit through Student Affairs Council meetings smiling beatifically amidst the droning bullshit. I said the secret was using one's imagination. "I play 'Damn the Dean' and picture something out of Dante, just updated."

         She was a respectable woman, the product of a good Catholic upbringing, but one light on the Dante-esque.

         So I bought her a Fantasy Aid: a miniature sound-effects device that you could point at someone and listen to the quiet sounds of machine-gun fire, rockets, and a couple other appropriately nasty noises (crossbow-bolt thuds?). She accepted the present and the advice and went on to finish her term of office — or sentence, perhaps — on Council.

         John of Patmos — John, anyway, of The Book of Revelations — was not the first guy to picture horrible ends for his enemies, and Dante was very far from the last. (And these guys were Christians!) Indeed, women, from time to time, have not been totally immune: one wife in a long-term marriage was asked if she had ever contemplated divorce. "Divorce?" she said. "Never! Now murder (pause) — frequently."

         Would the long-married and probably totally-harmless lady be wise to say that line to a shrink in California? Would the shrink be obligated to follow-up with questions to be sure she had not become a threat?

         Perhaps more interestingly, if Dante Aligheri were to discuss his visions with a clinical psychologist in California would he be reported to police authorities for threats to, say, a Pope or two?

         For sure he could get into trouble talking to a counsellor in some school districts.

         The drugs psychiatrists can offer can be effective, perhaps especially effective when combined with some talk. If the talk is potentially dangerous to a client, however — if it could get "shared" with police authorities or others — then there is an interesting balancing of risks and benefits here.

         Perhaps one would do best to come up with a story for a shrink that might get one healing drugs, but wouldn't get one into trouble. For serious talk, though, at least in California, one might do best to see a priest or lawyer; they're allowed to keep secrets.

"I and Thou" / "I and You" / "I and It" (10 Oct. 2013)

CAUTION 1: I'm going to steal from and then seriously over-simplify Martin Buber here, so if you're sophisticated, and strict, about philosophy or theology, you might want to stop reading right now or risk getting really pissed off.

CAUTION 2, and here I'll get into something I know about — There's a good chance even sophisticated English-speakers, for example many of my readers, have exactly the wrong understanding of the English word "thou."


            Most readers encounter "thee's" and "thou's" in old translations of the Bible or reading Shakespeare, and most, I suspect understand "thou" as a formal word: The way we wretched, finite, mortal sinners address God. That's wrong. "Thou" is the English cognate of the Germanic "du" and is like Spanish "tu" plus similar words in the Romance languages: it's the informal second person, used for addressing one's social inferiors, assuming one has social inferiors, or for addressing children or friends. "Thou" is for people and other beings with whom one can be informal, truly friendly.

            I'll modernize "thou" to "you-my-friend, or quite possible friend" and note that one of the nicer things about old Biblical translations is "Thou" for God: God not as Creator and Lord and King but as, at least potentially, friend or lover — or one's opponent in a wrestling match (Genesis 32.22-32).

            Jacob wrestling with the angel is a primitive dumb-ass story taken literally; as an image out of a healthy relationship with the divine, it's pretty profound.

            Anyway, an I-thou relationship is a personal one, as with a friend, including a friend with whom one wrestles or makes love: a relationship that's face-to-face, hand to hand: human-to-human, person-al.
            As I interpreted Buber for literary-critical purposes — it's a long story and irrelevant here — my "take-away" from Buber is that human relationship with God, the great and Eternal Thou, allows significant relationship with humans and other creatures, with the Others in our lived worlds. Whether through God or "immanent Being" or something totally mundane, there is always and necessarily a potential for human relationship with other humans, and that potential is of central importance.

            It's just a potential however, and that, too, is important.

            Look, last estimate I heard was that we humans can "maintain stable social relationships" with maybe 150 other people. Back when I was in a fraternity, our estimate was that a guy could associate fairly closely with maybe fifty other guys; so I think "Dunbar's number" of 150 is about right for a maximum. Obviously the great majority of us live and deal with far more than fifty to 150 other people, so the great majority of those relationships will not be "I-thou."

            Most will be I-it relationships — dealing with Others instrumentally, as if they were things — and that's okay.

            Here's a thought experiment. You go to a bank and deal with a clerk. You are polite to her — quite likely a "her" — and she back to you. Still, next time you go to the bank you may decide to use an ATM: an Automated Teller Machine, which we often redundantly, but usefully here, call "an ATM machine." In the colloquial sense of the word, the essence of your relationship with the teller was I-it: a machine clould replace her. Indeed, if she said to you, "Good morning! And how are you today?" And you said "Fine." And she said, "No, really: you look miserable. How are you?" and waited for a serious answer — if she switched to I-thou communication, it would be indecorous, improper, rather impolite.

            Similarly, back when I taught college, I saw my students as human beings, and at least on occasion I think they saw me that way as well. Still, they were to me primarily generators of papers to grade, and — given the limits of what they wanted to talk to me about — I think I appeared to them mostly as a generator of grades, eventually course credit, and, intermittently, of information that might prove useful, at least useful for getting a desired grade and course credit.  

            If one of my students walked into my office and said, "Hey, how are you?" and I didn't feel fine and gave an honest and detailed answer — I suspect I'd have gotten into trouble. Our relationship wasn't really "I-thou" and an "I-thou" answer wouldn't have been, as they say (often euphemistically), inappropriate.
            But sitting face-to-face in the office, our relationship wasn't exactly I-it. It was, or I think should have been, I-you: a relationship that might develop into friendship, in other contexts, and which might allow, in emergencies, intimate conversation, but was now more formal. It was an interaction not totally instrumental —our just using one another like things — but not quite personal either.

            I'll try to clarify that with three stories and a quotation, and then repeat my point. (Hey, I taught for a long time; trust me: repetition can get annoying, but it's useful.)

            Two of the stories are background, and all can be told quickly.

            On my first day of teaching at Miami University, Oxford, OH (my first job out of grad school), I had my students write writing samples, and for the rest of the week I had tutorials with them, and I graded and discussed with them what they had written. On my second day of teaching, the first day of the tutorials, the second student talked about the essay for a little bit and then started crying, telling me "This is about me!" and he told me how he'd knocked up his girlfriend … and wanted to know, in a sense, "What are you going to do about that?!"

            Uh, huh. Welcome to the Ed Biz, Rich; and welcome to a bit more I-thou than I was ready for, though I gave what advice I could. (And if in my writing I return to the subject of condoms fairly frequently, it's not only because I worked a summer in a public health lab and know the dangers of STDs.)

            On another occasion, I had become friendly with a former student — repeat: former student — and offered him a lift, and he asked if he could talk to me, and we talked, human to human, and his crying there in my car was not an imposition. He asked for advice, and I gave it, and he fairly quickly followed it: I advised him to get out of a relationship where he could not help a woman in great pain but was only hurting himself. Or, more exactly, allowing the woman and her friends to hurt him, repeatedly, systematically.

            And if I sometimes point out that survivors of horrors can move on to do damage themselves, it isn't only because I absorbed that lesson from Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1991), and, preeminently, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The woman hurting my former student and (now) apparently former friend survived a plane crash that killed her family. The main point of the story for this essay is that my conversation with the former student was an I-thou interaction that was decorous, appropriate. If you think my advice cruel, a secondary point is that a moment of truly human communication is just truly human communication: if you've dealt seriously with any humans, you know we often fuck up, sometimes in the form of giving bad advice. This advice I'll stand by, however; and if you're a woman reader who dislikes such insensitive advice, please imagine yourself with a woman friend in an abusive relationship with a guy who has suffered and/or is suffering horribly; now consider the question, Can she really help him, or is she mostly just getting hurt herself? I-thou, person-to-person, truly intimate human relationships — sometimes suck; and one should run, not walk, away from some of them.

            The last story leads to the quotation and back to my point.

            For a long time I was "Student Mediator" for the good-sized English Department at Miami U. Most of the time, I just shuffled paper in this job and helped students through a fairly complicated complaint process; every now and then, though, I actually mediated. In the relevant case, the student, teacher, and I got together, and I couldn't quite figure out at first what the issue was; and then it became clear, and I said something like, "Oh, you two dislike each other."

            Neither was comfortable with my observation. The teacher was far, far too professional to react emotionally to a student; and the student was much, much, much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike an authority figure.

            Right.

            I told them, "You don't have to like one another. You just have to get along for a few hours a week for the next ______ [whatever] weeks." And I explained to them one form of what I'm calling here an I-you relationship, with a "you" being "a 'somebody' but not somebody I like" — but in a neutral sense of not liking.

            And here I'll throw in the quotation.

            In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the highly-flawed protagonist, Brutus — yeah, he's the protagonist; like, are you going to pay money to see a play called Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger? — Brutus asks his messenger Lucilius how Lucilius had been received by Cassius, a main co-conspirator in the assassination of Caesar, and Brutus's current ally in the following civil war. Lucilius says he was treated "With courtesy and with respect enough" but without the little touches of easy-going friendship he was used to when dealing with Cassius. Ever the analyzing intellectual, if not good at it, Brutus tells Lucilius that Lucilius has described "A hot friend cooling" — i.e., a close friend growing more distant (and that's all; Brutus was a puritanical republican Roman, not an aristocrat from the Empire who'd hump most anything mammalian and breathing). "When love begins to sicken and decay," Brutus continues, "It useth an enforced ceremony" (4.2).

            If Brutus's attitude here is a good indication, and it is, cool correctness wasn't much appreciated in Shakespeare's time, and Shakespeare makes plausible that even ancient, aristocratic, republican Romans would feel the same way. We Americans, strongly into friendliness, have a problem with not liking someone — which is a big problem since there is no reason you should feel one way or another about the vast majority of human beings; there are very few you will actually like, actually know and like as individuals.

            I'm suggesting that a little "enforced ceremony" can be a damn good thing: cool correctness to people we actively dislike but must deal with, a warmer courtesy to those whom we might potentially like and where we can move beyond an I-it relationship to something a bit more personal and humane: I-you.

            As a practical matter, I'd eliminate the friendliness gestures of asking people, "And how are you this morning?" when we don't give a rat's ass and would barely hear an answer like, say, "Depressed, but not quite suicidal" (a great line I heard from the son of a friend). A generalized wish of "Good morning" is fine for now, although it'd be nice to go to something like aloha, or shalom or as-salam alaykum or "Peace, you-all" or "Hi; I'm _______" and state your name. As a practical matter I'd have us admit that the potential for intimate I-thou relationships is crucial — but that it's just a potential. We can have honest I-it relationships with people — coolly correct with enemies or those we just don't take to — and behave more warmly neutral to most.


            I-it, I-you, and, at least on occasion I-and-thou. "Love one another" when you can; rest of the time, let's try be polite and mildly cordial — and let it go at that.

One Dog I Helped Kill, Summer 1964 (19 Jan. 2014)

     I'm not sure what this story means. I do know that for a couple or three years after the incident, I needed to tell and retell it until I had fashioned it from an experience into a story: a work of narrative art, not necessarily a work of good art but art: something made, an act of "poiesis" — something outside of me and not just a memory.

 * * *

            In the summer of my junior year in college, I worked at Michael Reese Medical Center in Chicago, in the Department of Gastro-Intestinal Research, what would nowadays be called "Gastroenterology."
            My official title was "Student," and I was hired as part of a summer program where the head of the lab brought in a college student from outside the field to work in the lab "und ask shtupid quevstions" (our Director was Heinrich Necheles, MD, PhD, and one of the last of the products of the great German universities before Hitler took over and kicked out the Jews). Necheles knew I had pretty much become an English major, which was a bit too "outside" the field, but I was just a couple hours short of a degree in Microbiology, from a respectable school, and that was close enough.
            My job was like that of a summer intern, but "intern" means something else at a hospital, and I wasn't exploited to the degree interns are today. Anyway, one of my duties was to just be around as an observer who was bright but ignorant and ask questions that would force the people around me to explain things in terms layfolk — with a background in biology, but still layfolk — could understand. Another part of my duties was to be "low man in seniority" and do whatever needed to be done: help people as requested. And I had my own project they'd assigned: answer the question, "Would it be feasible to utilize strips of rat gut for the in vitro determination of the effects on stomach motility of a variety of pharmaceuticals?" The answer to that question was "No," and if they'd been able to do back then the sort of research you can do today in a couple hours on the web — if they'd been able to do the preliminary library research efficiently, they would have found out that it was known that rat gut didn't work very well for such assays, which is why labs doing that kind of work used guinea pig uteri.
            I was able to turn in my final report on my project written out on a 3 x 5 card, so I had a lot of time for "low man in seniority" work, and for reading. (Necheles approved of my reading on the job, including works he hadn't assigned me. His most memorable comment was picking up my copy of a Buddhism-for-Ignoramuses book and asking who was reading it, to which I said, "I am, doctor," and he said, "Good book. Tends to stress the spiritual a bit too much, but if you keep that in mind, it's good." I replied, "I didn't know you'd studied Buddhism." He had, when he was in China, developing the artificial kidney — a point, the one about dialysis, he casually dropped into another conversation.)
            One "LMiS" assignment came after a combination of two small mistakes.
            The first was that some surgical wire got small kinds in a few places, weakening it. The second was that someone inadvertently put the wrong barbiturate in the Nembutal bottle, as it turned out, a significantly weaker barbiturate.
            Nembutal is a brand name for pentobarbital, and it is described on Wikipedia as "a short-acting barbiturate" that "In high doses […] causes death by respiratory arrest," hence its use "for euthanasia for humans as well as animals."
            We would pour a palmful or so of it in a very large syringe, add water, shake, and then use it to put down — euthanize, kill — animals that we were finished with. In most cases, the "euthanizing" was required by law and by ethics, as we were reminded by a placard in each room of the lab giving the rules for what, in the 1960s, was the ethical treatment of lab animals.
            One of the lab techs had prepared such a syringe of, he thought, Nembutal solution and called me to go out with him in the courtyard to help him put down a dog.
            The dog — a fairly small one — was lying in the courtyard outside the lab, on its right side, in obvious distress. I don't know what the study was, but it involved a large incision in the dog's left side, one large enough to require using surgical wire to hold together the ribs.
            As I mentioned, the wire had been weakened and had broken, and the dog had in his side a gaping wound.
            I squatted down and took the dog's left front paw, turning it to "pop" the vein. The other tech injected the barbiturate.
            As I mentioned, the barbiturate wasn't Nembutal but something much less potent. The dog did not die, nor was it significantly anesthetized.
            He panted, straining to breathe with his lungs exposed.
            The other tech went inside, leaving me with the dog. I kept holding its leg and looking at him, in the face, with me squatting sideways to the dog.
            Now something I hadn't mentioned.
            One of my college classes was personal defense, and the one and only thing I was good at was what was called at the time and in that class "the Japanese choke hold." That was probably an error in terminology; anyway, it was the hold where one stands behind an opponent and, if all goes well, gets the forearm of one's dominant arm across the opponent's throat and the hand of one's other arm at the back of an opponent's head. (If I ever had to do this in actual personal defense, I would've bit into the opponent's back as well.) The idea isn't to choke but to cut the blood off to the brain and render the opponent unconscious, and limp. And then stop, because after the opponent loses consciousness there's the danger — probably slight, but there — of snapping his neck.
            Looking down at the dog, as time went by, and he suffered, and the other tech did not return, I thought, "I might know how to kill this dog quickly."
            And I started to stand up, but only a little bit up, in a position I couldn't long hold; and I heard simultaneously two voices, like in an old Morality Play: both speaking at once, but in some way that I could understand both.
            One said, "Kill the dog. You just may know how. 'No animal shall be allowed to suffer more than is required for the experiment or longer than is required for the experiment.' That is your duty. That is what compassion requires."
            The other said, an archaic voice, "Yes, kill the dog. You've killed with a needle, but what does it feel like to kill with your hands?"
            And I was paralyzed while a line from T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral ran through my head, over and over, "The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
            I have no idea how long I half-stood, half-crouched there, but my knees hurt for the rest of the day.
            Then the other tech came over, kind of shook me, and we killed the dog.
            Nothing came of my moment — or minutes — of paralysis, at least nothing in terms of my status at the lab. Aside from the decency and discretion of the other tech (or its never getting back to me if he gossiped), there were soon other things to talk about. The mix-up in barbiturates/anesthetics had other results.
            Specifically, a dog who should have been thoroughly anesthetized turned out not to be, and when Dr. Ari — possibly his nickname — put the trachea tube in, the dog bit him, triggering the City of Chicago and State of Illinois's very stringent rules on rabies. So a cop or two showed up at the lab to impound the dog, who was in no shape to go anywhere given that a new anesthetic was prepared and the experiment performed and those State laws and professional ethics summarized on the wall plaques required that we kill the dog. And so the Rich story around the lab was that I was guy who carried the dog brain over to Public Health for examination for rabies, in a lunch cooler in a Planters' Dry Roasted Salted Peanuts jar.
            The dog, of course, didn't have rabies; Dr. Ari's injury was slight — although a dog bite on a surgeon's hand is a matter for concern — and I finally got to use the mnemonic for the order of the cranial nerves. (The one I used went "On old Olympus's towering tops, / A Finn and German viewed some hops"; Dr. Ari was first of the group to identify the nerve we needed to know: "The mnemonic is faster in Japanese," he said. I have no idea why the form we filled out required us to identify the nerves involved in removing the brain.) By coincidence I worked the next summer at Illinois Public Health and was vaguely remembered as the guy who walked in with the brain in the Planters' Dry Roasted Peanut jar.
            Several things came of the experience for me personally. Most obviously was my walking around for a couple or three or four years like a low-rent version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, telling the story, including to the captive audience of some of my classes.
            Clearly, the experience had gotten to me.
            For one thing, Eliot's couplet is correct in its context in Murder in Cathedral, but mostly it's bullshit. George Carlin repeats somewhere in his impressive canon the Roman Catholic, high Anglican, and general Christian doctrine, "By your intentions shall ye be judged," and in a religion stressing belief and doctrine that stress on intentions makes sense. As my handful of loyal readers know, I'm more in the Jewish tradition of caring more about conduct: if people do the right thing for whatever reasons, at least they did the right thing.
            The right thing with the dog at Reese would have been to kill him as quickly and humanely as possible. On the other hand, if I'd done so, I probably would have been traumatized by guilt, or maybe by too big a step toward self-recognition.
            I had helped kill dogs with a needle: overdosing them. It's a quiet death, mostly visible by the lines on the instruments flattening out: "flatlining" as the expression has it. With the rats and one rabbit, I felt bad, but not that much; and the one cat we killed had almost blinded a volunteer — with justification: as part of an escape attempt — and I really wasn't around for when we finished with the cat.
            Dogs are larger (generally) than cats or rabbits or — definitely — than rats, and however irrational that is, the larger size is significant; more significant, I'd grown up with dogs; dogs for me have strong reality as sentient beings: I like and have bonded with dogs.
            "What would it feel like to kill with your hands?"
            I am serious when I say that voice was archaic, and I'm pretty sure that at the time I had at most only heard of Carl Jung and knew little or nothing about his theory of the Shadow. I had met that Shadow, my Shadow, and I was not happy about it.
            In my family, my sister was "the smart one"; I was "the good one."
            But very apparently not entirely good, maybe, at the core, not good at all. Something deep inside of me, something very much part of me and what made me me was at least curious about killing and killing with emotional response a creature he saw as a someone, a face looking up at him, a face he knew elicited connection and compassion. He had to know that the face elicited connection and compassion because other aspects of me were feeling those emotions.
            Paralysis was an answer, and the safest answer for my stability, but a wrong answer.

            That time of paralysis, the time of unnecessary suffering for that dog, is upon my conscience and, like some of my work that summer more generally, still, a bit, upon my soul.

Authority: Academic and Other (8 Feb. 2014)

"… you will respect my authoritah!" — Eric Cartman

            In Joe Haldeman's classic SF/Vietnam-War novel The Forever War (1972 f. — the composition dates are complicated), there's a dialog between newly-minted Major William Mandella and Colonel Jack Kynock, Mandella's "Temporal Orientation Officer" (it has been a long war, involving moving humans through the galaxy faster than light, so time within the novel also gets complicated).
            Relevant here is Kynock's discussion with Mandella of Mandella's psychology, about which Kynock may know more than Mandella, since he's seen Mandella's profile, which is too highly classified for the eyes of a mere major. Mandella questions his own competence for command, and Kynock tells him that, actually, Mandella does "have a certain potential" for leadership. "But it would be along the lines of a teacher or minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll made a hell of a bad officer unless you shape up" (opening of part IV, "Major Mandella").
            That is, "shape up" from the point of view of the Army.
            I found this dialog interesting on more than esthetic grounds. I had been a member of both a high school and college fraternity, had considered a military career, and I ended up teaching. The fraternity experience — the college part at least — I'll weave in and out of this essay. My potential military career story starts with my taking two years of high school ROTC, and then quitting in part because I had stopped growing at 5'2" and, at least at that time, I was two inches too short to be an officer in any of the military services of the United States. I was simultaneously, however, two inches too tall to be "4F" and "unsuitable for military service": so I still had to take two years of college ROTC, face getting my ass drafted and sent to Vietnam, and couldn't even be a cadet platoon sergeant, 'cause it'd look silly to have a platoon march with so short a man in a visible position. I did not have a good attitude toward the University of Illinois ROTC requirement.
            Still, I appreciated getting introduced to history in college ROTC, and spending a few hours a week in a quasi-military context was useful for my fraternity work. I could advise new-initiate active brothers to be alert in ROTC before they dealt with pledges; new initiates, I advised, should imitate the regular Army officers and NCOs and avoid acting like the cadet officers: i.e., they should be polite and confident and not assholes on their way to being fragged by their own troops — although a US-led hot war in Vietnam with fragged second-lieutenants mostly came later. (Not to say that a variety of unfriendly fire bringing down over-eager second lieutenants was something new with Vietnam, but "fragging" as a term was new.)
            Anyway, I took note of the behavior of regular Army officers because I was and am somewhat like William Mandella, but just somewhat; Mandella may be a nicer person than I am — and Joe Haldeman is a much nicer person. In part, I did want to impose my will on other guys, though surprised when I got away with it.
            A new initiate once asked me, "'Lich, what would you have done if one of us pledges hadn't obeyed you?" I paused and said, "Oh. (beat) That never occurred to me." And then I waited another beat until the irony became obvious, and I laughed and admitted to mild amazement each time I was obeyed. The trick, I explained to the guy, is to give an order courteously and sounding like it never crossed your mind that you'd be told to fuck off. And then I passed on that advice to emulate regular Army officers and avoid acting like the cadet variety. (The eventually fragged Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House [1978] had real-world antecedents.)
            So from the frat angle I was interested in authority, and also as a new student of history and just beginning student of human behavior. Older boys and young men are fairly easy to order around, but they're mostly used to taking orders from their parental-age elders. It takes a bit of doing to condition pledges to accept authority from other guys pretty much their own age and additional effort to get active brothers to accept the authority of people they live with, know, and have elected.
            I was intrigued that pledges would take my orders and actives (mostly) follow the rules; and when we had to come up with a new pledge policy after one particularly disastrous semester, I worked with the group devising new policies, even doing a bit of research.
            And, what the hell, I was also interested in my own psychology since I got off as much as the next guy — or almost; we had a couple or three really weird brothers — ahem, I was interested because this side of downright pathology I got off as much as most on the "S" part of the old frat-lodge S&M fun and games.
            As the 1960s wore on though, and as I started my teaching career, my concerns got more serious.
            With the 1960s wearing on, so did the Vietnam War; and, more personally, I saw violence much less deadly but much, much closer to home — I was in Chicago for the riots of 1968 — and I started reading on violence and on authority, most especially Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1963 f. studies of, as stated in the title of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority.
            Less sensationally, I found myself "behind the big desk" in classrooms and in authority, and uncomfortable.
            I had no problem with imposing my will on pledges if I could: I never ordered them to do anything really wrong (for which the next part would not be justification), and they really did have the choice to say "fuck you" to me and follow that up with "and just fuck it!" and depledge. There was strong social pressure to stick with pledging, and moving would be inconvenient; but it could be done.
            All the courses I taught when I started teaching were required courses, and if my students dropped my section, there could be bigger inconveniences than moving from a fraternity into a dorm: like not getting into another section and slowing down their "satisfactory progress toward the degree" and, in some cases, putting in danger a scholarship or a draft deferment.
            More was at stake, and giving a low grade offered me no straight-forward Thomas Hobbesian "sudden glory" or Marquis de Sadean kick from imposing my will on — as in harming — other people. From my high school fraternity on, the bigger kick for me was to indirectly "impose […] ideas on other people," to get them to do what I wanted them to do, by convincing them to do it.
            Or getting them to believe the truth of my interpretation of … whatever.
            I wanted the students to respect and accept my authority as a teacher, but my authority, as someone who knew the material and could help them learn it and pick up some handy skills (like writing and critical thinking).
            Do note my arrogance here: I wanted to be respected for my authority, for what I knew and could do and to teach. I wanted respect for my personal authority, a variety not given me and enforced by the University and the State, but authority totally mine. I did not want subservience from students because as "instructor or record" I would assign each a grade.
            First off, subservience from students as students kind of disgusted me. I hadn't gotten subservience from pledges in either my high school nor college fraternity, and by the time I started teaching it was "been there, done that" for getting obedience. More important perhaps, in the classroom the bureaucratic "authority" of the grade (etc.) undermined my authority as a scholar and teacher and intellectual. I couldn't be sure if I'd convinced a student, or if the student went along with my ideas just to suck up.
            I suspect most of the students also couldn't be sure. Certainly, one guy said in class, looking a little shaken, "I'll write whatever it takes to get an 'A' …; I guess that makes me kind of a whore."
            Uh, yeah.
            I'm not a Christian or a Platonist, and I do not celebrate Mind over body — or even separate the two; but if it is wrong to prostitute one's body for a grade, to suck up to an instructor physically, it is also wrong — if more socially and academically acceptable — to prostitute one's integrity by pretending to agree when one isn't convinced.
            Now there's no problem if a good Christian student starts off an essay with a phrase like, "In a secular, materialist (godless and probably damnable) reading …" — and goes on to apply that approach to a literary text or an issue in history or a problem in evolutionary biology. Indeed, it would be unethical for an instructor to downgrade for such an opening: one can insist that a student know something or other, not that a student believe. As John Stuart Mill stated in a particularly strong illustration of the principle, "[…] there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them." Similarly, it would've been okay if one of my devout Freudian instructors insisted on my handing in a rigorous Freudian reading of, say, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, provided s/he had no problem with a brief cover note noting that I found ideological Freudianism, let's say unpersuasive (let's not say in addition, at least not on a cover letter, "and pernicious as clinical psychology and a little creepy").
            Haldeman's Major William Mandella is a better man than I am because he would want "to lead from empathy, compassion" as a primary motivation. I approve of empathy and compassion, but I'm a bit more into the arrogance of thinking I have something to say — obviously, since I write essays — and as a teacher I was pretty sure I had useful things to teach. That is the sort of authority I wanted acknowledged. I wanted not so much to impose my ideas on my students or anyone else but to have those ideas respected: listened to, considered, thought about, and respected enough to challenge.

            I know and knew that if my teaching didn't lead to credits and grades and a diploma, that I would've had precious few students and soon no job — and might've gotten punched out on my way to be fired. Still, I didn't like that kind of external authority because it undermined authority I that is — so long as my mind holds — intrinsic to me.

Cynicism, Stoicism, and "The Prisoner's Dilemma" (Sort of) [25 February 2014]

            It was undoubtedly part of some program under the over-arching theory my friend Dan Prickett used to call "Cliché of the Month Management"; anyway, some time more or less in the late 1970s or early 1980's, I found myself in a faculty workshop where we played a very unscientific variation on the psychology-experiment/game-theory game, "The Prisoner's Dilemma."

            In our exercise, participants were paired off — I found myself (possibly significantly) with a guy from the Miami University business school — and told that we'd both been arrested and were held in the same cell and allowed to talk until we were figuratively separated and each told we'd better cooperate and testify against the other. If neither of the pair "defected" and cooperated with the arresting authorities, we'd both go free for lack of evidence. If Prisoner 1 defected and agreed to testify against Prisoner 2, he would go to jail for a brief time, and Prisoner 2 would be sentenced to prison for a significant hard time; and, necessarily, vice-versa. If both defected, both would go to jail for a medium-length sentence.

            The details in sentencing differed from the classical "Prisoner's Dilemma" (or "Prisoners' Dilemma"), and I may misremember the variation, although I'm sure that we played the "iterative" form — where we played a number of rounds — and had the tweak that the two prisoners could negotiate between "interrogations."

            When our workshop group was asked for questions, I asked the Game Masters to tell us the specifics of the charges. They refused. I asked if we'd be allowed to consult a lawyer. No. How long might we be held without formal charges? They wouldn't say. Were we actually guilty of the crime — or did the authorities at least think we were? No comment.

            We started the game, and I refused to defect, and my partner defected.

            When we talked over the round, I noted my questions of the Game Masters and that their answers indicated that we were obviously in some sort of Kafkaesque situation and should be faithful to one another since we obviously couldn't trust the authorities.

            Next round, he betrayed me.

            In our conversation following that round, I explained that if he trusted the authorities enough to cooperate, then he should trust them to free us if we both remained silent; hence it would be in his best interest to stay loyal.

            And he defected again.

            And again, and again, for all the iterations we played before getting on to whatever the hell the lesson was for college teachers, scientists, and scholars in late-20^th-century southwest Ohio.

            Now if I had had my wits about me and had watched more old prison movies as a kid, I would have stood up after the third round or so, and interrupted the game by calling out in a controlled but loud voice, "Hey, screws! Send over a medic. My cellmate just accidentally fell on a shank fifteen times!" (and let the other participants in the exercise laugh and tell the Game Masters what happens in prisons to narks, ratfinks, stool pigeons, or whatever slang was appropriate for their generation ["nark," surprisingly, goes back to at least 1859 or 1860, but was making a comeback].)

            I didn't have my wits about me and was prudent enough to keep quiet in the, let's say, "directed discussion" that followed the exercise. I'd already pissed off my seniors and betters by asking those questions outside the Game.

            Writing now, with the advantage of hindsight and absolutely nothing to lose, I'll tell why I didn't defect.

            It is not because I'm a nice person or because I liked the ratfucking nark — in the Game — from the business school.

            My most respectable reason is that among the traditions I grew up in there was a touch of the capital "C" Cynic and the Stoic (but without the masochistic bullshit of the small "s" kind of "stoicism" that was classically associated with the macho-militaristic, slave-exploiting, boy-exploiting noble-folk of Sparta). I believed with the Cynics that "Virtue is its own reward," 'cause it ain't reliably gonna get any other; and I respected the idea of the Stoics that the only thing over which human beings have real, significant control over is our own integrity.

            In a Kafkaesque trap in a holding cell under some sort of weird tyranny, about all one has is one's integrity, and this one was going to hold onto mine and not have my behavior controlled by the decisions of, say, some small-c cynical asshole from the B-school who'd betray me and probably his mother, at least in a game.

            Okay, maybe that position isn't all that respectable, ethics-wise, but it's probably more respectable than my willingness to be stubborn when I had nothing serious to lose: I was naïve enough to be confident I was going to get promoted because I deserved it, even if I disrupted some pet project workshop project of some administrator showing, "Hey, I read a book!" (for a complementary theory of management from Dan Prickett).
            Cheating a good deal and applying common sense and real-world experience to the world of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game — I wasn't going to trust the in-Game authorities, ca. 1980 and certainly wouldn't trust them now, not when a lawyer friend has pointed out that real-world cops and prosecutors feel free to lie to suspects.

            And ca. 1980 I certainly wouldn't have trusted the social psychologists who put together such games. This was before strong rules on "The Ethical Treatment of Subjects," and lying by experimenting psychologists et al. was accepted and habitual.

            So I was something of an outlier, as we say nowadays, for "The Prisoner's Dilemma" of three decades and more ago, and I wish I'd pushed the point then and more forcefully since then.
            Stoicism and Cynicism are pretty sterile in themselves, but there is much to be said for "inner-direction," or pure cussedness, as part of one's repertoire, and there's much to be said, in outrageous situations — especially when they're just part of a game — for maintaining integrity.

            Along with Hamlet himself, Shakespeare' Polonius is a good example of a man of much schooling who doesn't think all that well. "[T]o thine own self be true, / And it must follow […] / Thou canst not then be false to any man" is a glaring non sequitur: If you're truly a scoundrel being true to yourself requires being false to all sorts of people. Still, the deeper joke both in the play itself and more generally is that old fart Polonius is correct: "This above all: to thine own self be true" is good advice to his son Laertes and usually good advice, period.

            Job standing up to a God grown vicious toward him affirms, "Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me." The rest of us wimps can at least pretend to integrity in a game — or realize that central to real-world freedom is occasionally breaking out of the mandated games and setting up new rules.