Showing posts with label flower power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flower power. Show all posts

14 November 2015

Six smarter ways to stop the terrorists

It is important to fight the real enemy, not an imaginary one
François Hollande declared the attacks on Paris “an act of war that was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh [the Islamic State], against France.” The French president (who was at the soccer game outside which bombs were detonated), has promised that France will wage "pitiless war" against those who conceived and executed the attacks.

Now there's two ways to respond to the Paris attacks - an unthinking violent way, and a smart way. Guess which one is in favour? The influential magazine, Foreign Policy, puts it very clearly, it sees  in the streets of Paris an occasion for the ruthless application of hard power.

France has already had one outrage - in the senseless killing of a group of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists seated around their conference table. The response to that - essentially an attack on free speech - was a new law prohibiting language that the State interpreted as supportive of terrorism. In the days that followed, several hapless French motorists were given life terms in prison for breaching the new rules.

A 34-year-old man who hit a car while drunk, injuring the other driver and goaded the police when they detained him by praising the acts of the Hebdo killers was sentenced to four years in prison. In the following days, according to Cédric Cabut, a French prosecutor, a good hundred people were investigated or charged with making or posting comments that 'supported terrorism'. Of course, the charges were ridiculous. But the principle of 'free speech' the cartoonists had died for was buried further.

And rather than arrest and carefully dissect the mindset of the terrorists, the government organised a spectacular 'shoot out' with them, which left the media satisfied but the nation deprived of an opportunity for a meaningful investigation into the underlying issues.

And now less that a year on, another and indeed worse tragedy, underlines the failure to learn anything from the first one.

The immediate response was to 'close the borders' - a grand slamming shut of the characteristic French shutters  -  to stop terrorists getting in or out. This involved several hundred thousand police and army. But it was entirely irrelevant to a terrorist cell made up largely of European (three were from Brussels!), indeed, French, nationals.

So let me tentatively and in a spirit of solidarity, offer the French authorities some more 'analytical' six ideas on behalf of the ordinary people of France  - not the government or the security forces - who were the chosen targets as well as the victims in both attacks.

1. There is no way to stop small groups of people killing ordinary citizens. You can protect your elites, but cannot protect the vast majority. Thus the real battle is for minds and hearts.
"A 242-ship Navy will not stop one motivated murderous fanatic from emptying the clip of an AK-47 into the windows of a crowded restaurant."

2. It follows from this that the security services must work under and for the people, not on top of and against them, as has always been the case in France. The most egregious example of what happens when the security services operate in isolation from the people came in the Second World War when the gendarmerie rounded up Jews for transportation to the Nazi death camps.

3. Instead of these 'muscular' reasons - immediately proffered again by the French politicians - there should be an intelligent response, both in terms of social policy and in terms of security. Suspicious individuals, of whom for example returned jihadis are an obvious and entirely manageable group, should be individually watched and their activities curtailed. Policies directed against the 60 million French people - such as closing the borders, searching all vehicles etc etc - are not only an abuse of power but a waste of resources.

4. The French State needs to respect citizens of all religious persuasions. It simply won't do, for example, to  impose pork on Muslims (or Jews, or indeed vegetarians) in school canteens, nor is there any rational argument for opposing the wearing of headscarves. Face-obscuring garments I think are in a different category. There is a tendency to seek the erasure of religion today rather than the freedom of religion. At the same time, radical Islam itself seems to advance by encroaching on the laws of a nation. It expands its ‘territory’, where other religions focus on heart.
5. Part of the State's obligations to all its constituent groups is to ensure equality of opportunity - and to actively combat inequality. It is in the swamps of the sprawling suburbs of the cities, that the Hebdo killers festered. Jihadis are by no means explained as simply frustrated workers, but on the other hand, their twisted senses of grievance are fuelled by the extremes they see in life around them.

6. The militarisation of the police and the frequent use of the army by the French State creates inevitably a response, and the people who suffer most, as we have seen now, are the weakest and most defenceless. It is thus shameful to hear the drum beating and the clamouring for more 'resources' from the security services that have so clearly let down their citizens.

Europe needs to think outside the box, not only about war but about peace.  I sense that it needs fundamentally new ideas, even mindsets, and an openness to new ideas without its obsession to preserve what it has, or idolises. 

But there's one other practical step that can be taken. Stop propping up the anti-democratic regimes in the Gulf States. The ones behind 9/11, and many other atrocities worldwide - and now the new horror in Paris.

07 November 2015

Who is 'the Most Powerful' Really?

Posted by Martin Cohen 

This 'thought experimenter' was powerful in a way too

The 'Rich list' was bad enough, but oh no, here comes the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People!

Forbes' list  (Reuters' picture version is here)  is really silly stuff – but more than that – its publication and repetition around the world’s media, show how little we respect AUTHORS and artists and doctors and scientists and philosophers and... well you can add your own kind of ‘powerful’ people. Here though, it is Putin is first, Obama second and the Pope is No. 4.

Forbes said it took four factors into consideration when it created the list: how many people they have power over (that looks like a tautology, if you ask me); the financial resources they control (in what sense? Obama can’t really spend the US Treasury on his projects); if they have influence in more than one sphere (wobbly criterion); and how actively they throw their weight around in the world. That last one is the real indicator of how crude the thinking is here. Is a politician more powerful if they wage a war or if they achieve their aims through behind-the-scenes diplomacy?

Curious perhaps, though, given these rules, is to take a second look at Facebook’s Zuckerberg. He’s rich – but does he really throw his weight around? Does he control us when we  click his 'like' buttons?

It’s a highly political list...

Obama had been on the top of the list every year he had been President except in 2010, when Hu Jintao, the former political and military leader of China, was Numero Uno. Steve Forbes is a Presidential hopeful, as well as magazine organ grinder. The crowd-pulling monkey in this case is Forbes writer, Caroline Howard, who explained some of the thinking:
“Putin has solidified his control over Russia, while Obama's lame duck period has seemingly set in earlier than usual for a two-term president — latest example: the government shutdown mess.” 
... but I’d go further. It’s not just politics, it's crass, childish and perpetuates myths about what is really important in life and society. Bankers, financiers and increasingly politicians too, are people who circulate money - not people who change the world. Ideas, not individuals, truly change the world!




31 October 2015

Diet Tips of the Great Philosophers ≠92: Henry Thoreau and Green Beans

Posted by Martin Cohen

Many of the philosophers whom we rely on to represent little oases of good sense and rationality in a disorganised world, disappointingly turnout, on closer inspection, to be not only rather eccentric, but downright irrational. David Henry Thoreau, an anarchist who eked out a living by making pencils while living in a shed by a pond, on the other hand, appears even at first glance to be rather eccentric. Short, shabby, wild-haired and generally rather unprepossessing, he nonetheless seems to have anticipated much of the ecological renaissance that today’s philosophers (and diet gurus) have only just begun to talk about. Oh, and yes, he was always rather thin.

In his Journal entry for January 7, 1857, Thoreau says of himself: 
'In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it - dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. . . I wish to . . . be sane a part of every day.'
He is famous for having spent two years living in a small wood cabin by a pond, and living off, not so much three fruits of the woods, but his own allotment. Naturally, Thoreau was a vegetarian. He remarks how one farmer said to him: ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ even as the farmer:
‘... religiously devoted a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones, walking all the while behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.’
Thoreau himself cultivated, not so much an allotment, as a small bean farm, of two and a half acres, which provided for himself the bulk of the food he ate –peas, corn, turnips, potatoes and above all green beans, the last of which crop he sold for extra cash. During the second year, he reduced his crops, if anything, writing:
‘ … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.’
He drank mainly water, writing that it was ‘the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor’ and worrying about the temptations of a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!

From life in the woods he learned, among other things, that it ‘cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food’ and that ‘a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.’

In a chapter of his most famous book, Walden, entitled simply, ‘The Bean Field,’ Thoreau records how:
‘I came to love my rows, my beans… They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.’
For Thoreau, buying food, allowing others to grow food for him, would have disconnected him from the land, from direct contact with Nature, the source of both his bodily and spiritual nourishment. It was not enough to just have something to eat; he also wanted the experience of growing it.

Diet tips:

Food that you’ve grown has a special quality
You don’t need to eat a huge range of things to be healthy 


06 September 2015

Picture Post No. 4 The Dan Dare Badge

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Martin Cohen and Ken Sequin

 

Team affiliations: Interplanetary Space Fleet


Hey, have you got Dan Dare's cap badge?

Alas, no, sigh...  yet another aspirational challenge failed... this one long ago from the small ads in boys magazines in the 1950s along with other, pointed advice about beach physiques and stamp collecting. Dan's 'authentic' cap badge in brilliant red, black and yellow, that is, with its steel torpedo shaped spaceship at the centre? Surely everyone would want such a badge - but there was a catch. You had to be a member of the Horlicks Spacemen's Club to get one. Not an insurmountable obstacle to be sure, but money was involved.

Dan, or to give him his full title, Colonel Daniel McGregor Dare, was a very British hero, with very British values, such as all parents might hope their boys would aspire to. Throughout the 1950s he rocketed around the Solar System pulling off incredible feats of piloting skills and facing up to the most awful predicaments with a stiff jaw and those famous way eyebrows. Curiously, his spaceship, Anastasia, was named after his Aunt.

There was of course a serious side too to the strip (and the popular radio serialisation) because Dan was in fact involved in fighting evil, personified in the scheming Venusian dictator, the Mekon. Not that they went on about it much, the founder of the Eagle (the comic Dan appeared in), the Rev. Marcus Morris, was vicar of the Southport church of St James at the time, and another clergyman, Rev. Dr. Chad Varah, wrote key scripts in the early years. Of more pressing import to badge wearers, was to be involved in battling the fiendishly cunning oppressor of the the reptilian inhabitants of that watery planet known as 'the Treens'. Unfortunately, for all Dan's policeman-like efforts, the Mekon escaped at the end of each story ready to return with an even more inventive scheme for the conquest of Earth…

More affiliations…

The Eagle  folded long ago (in 1969) but Dan still jets around from time to time. As well as several new comic incarnations, there have been more radio serialisations, and some musical appreciations too. Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett wrote Dan Dare into his song 'Astronomy Domine', from the band's debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with the line 'Stairway scare, Dan Dare, who's there?' Elton John recorded 'Dan Dare (Pilot Of The Future)' for his 1975 album Rock Of The Westies and the British punk rock group The Mekons included a song 'Dan Dare' on their album The Quality of Mercy is not Strnen (sic).

As to the badges, well, its not too late, you can buy brand new ones plated in 24 carat gold for the surprisingly modest price of about £10. But the 'authentic' badge, was not made of metal, but of plastic.That's the space age!

Things you don’t want anyone to know when wearing the badge

Colonel Dan Dare was originally 'Chaplain' Dan Dare of Space Fleet, with rather dull pastoral duties. Only at the very last minute did he swap hats to become the dashing space pilot that boys and girls might really aspire to follow.

30 August 2015

The Power of Man

Posted by Gregory Kyle Klug
      and Thomas Scarborough

What is man?  The answers to this question vary – typically according to the scientific discipline which asks it.  Chemistry, genetics, biology, psychology, history, or religion, all yield different answers as to what man is.  

In fact all of these disciplines are in some way symptomatic of the essence of man, and none should we dare to exclude from our explorations.  And then, too, since the middle of the 20th century, linguistics has joined the inquiry into the nature of 'man' – language being what we call a semiotic code which reveals (in coded form) much about the structure and function of the mind.  With this in mind, the purpose here is to reflect on the importance of a single word in our language in revealing what man is, namely: 'power'.

'Power' has one of the highest word frequencies in English.  According to research of the University of Central Lancashire, 'power' boasts 385 occurrences per million.  This makes it a word which is weightier than love and war and the weather.  It plays a bigger part in our language than dogs and cats, and hours and minutes. Plato, in fact, implied that this is the one word which defines man.  What he (or she) does with power, he wrote, is 'the measure of a man'.

At first sight,  it might seem difficult to discern any coherence in the many variant definitions of power.  In fact sociologists David and Julia Jary present it as a prime example of an 'essentially contested word'.  We speak of the power of an earthquake, one's power of mind, colonial power, a power pitcher, the power of a performance, even the power which one has over one's own self.  How might we derive, from all these many uses of 'power', a unified insight into the nature of 'man'?

Power is a 'transformational capacity', wrote the sociologist Anthony Giddens.  'Despite resistance', wrote the sociologist Max Weber.  In fact, on closer inspection, it is the triumph of power over resistance in all our human activities which would seem most appropriately to define it.  This is a definition, too, which we can universalise: power is 'the ability to overcome significant resistance in a relatively short period of time':
• Physical power: Military power overcomes the resistance of enemy forces. 
• Social power: A popular movement overcomes the resistance of history.
• Intellectual power: A theory resists being known, until the power of mind reveals it. 
• Moral power: We have the power to choose against the resistance of pain, and pleasure.
• Power of imagination: The imagination overcomes the resistance of familiarity.  And
• Sexual power:  All resistance crumbles (need we say more)?
Contrast this with the eighteenth century French philosopher Paul d'Holbach, the first to (scandalously) suggest that the laws of Newton now applied to man: '[Man] is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control.' Yet power, if we are to believe the linguistic evidence, belongs to the very essence of man, in virtually every sphere.  In fact, it is a theme of Biblical proportions.  The opening chapters of Genesis grandly portray not only the power of God, but man's procreative power, physical power, and intellectual power. 

Power is far more than the narrow conception of it which was extolled by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: namely, the 'will to power' which drives us to achieve.  Rather, it is to be found in all the ordinary moments of life.  And this is not who we may yet become, but who we are. 
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
–William Shakespeare

_______________________________

A single post does not permit a survey of the many aspects and examples of power.  Author Gregory Kyle Klug unfolds further thoughts on the subject at The Philosopher and at What is Power?

The Power of Man

Posted by Gregory Kyle Klug
      and Thomas Scarborough

What is man?  The answers to this question vary – typically according to the scientific discipline which asks it.  Chemistry, genetics, biology, psychology, history, or religion, all yield different answers as to what man is.  

In fact all of these disciplines are in some way symptomatic of the essence of man, and none should we dare to exclude from our explorations.  And then, too, since the middle of the 20th century, linguistics has joined the inquiry into the nature of 'man' – language being what we call a semiotic code which reveals (in coded form) much about the structure and function of the mind.  With this in mind, the purpose here is to reflect on the importance of a single word in our language in revealing what man is, namely: 'power'.




'Power' has one of the highest word frequencies in English.  According to research of the University of Central Lancashire, 'power' boasts 385 occurrences per million.  This makes it a word which is weightier than love and war and the weather.  It plays a bigger part in our language than dogs and cats, and hours and minutes. Plato, in fact, implied that this is the one word which defines man.  What he (or she) does with power, he wrote, is 'the measure of a man'.

At first sight,  it might seem difficult to discern any coherence in the many variant definitions of power.  In fact sociologists David and Julia Jary present it as a prime example of an 'essentially contested word'.  We speak of the power of an earthquake, one's power of mind, colonial power, a power pitcher, the power of a performance, even the power which one has over one's own self.  How might we derive, from all these many uses of 'power', a unified insight into the nature of 'man'?

Power is a 'transformational capacity', wrote the sociologist Anthony Giddens.  'Despite resistance', wrote the sociologist Max Weber.  In fact, on closer inspection, it is the triumph of power over resistance in all our human activities which would seem most appropriately to define it.  This is a definition, too, which we can universalise: power is 'the ability to overcome significant resistance in a relatively short period of time':
• Physical power: Military power overcomes the resistance of enemy forces. 
• Social power: A popular movement overcomes the resistance of history.
• Intellectual power: A theory resists being known, until the power of mind reveals it. 
• Moral power: We have the power to choose against the resistance of pain, and pleasure.
• Power of imagination: The imagination overcomes the resistance of familiarity.  And
• Sexual power:  All resistance crumbles (need we say more)?
Contrast this with the eighteenth century French philosopher Paul d'Holbach, the first to (scandalously) suggest that the laws of Newton now applied to man: '[Man] is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control.' Yet power, if we are to believe the linguistic evidence, belongs to the very essence of man, in virtually every sphere.  In fact, it is a theme of Biblical proportions.  The opening chapters of Genesis grandly portray not only the power of God, but man's procreative power, physical power, and intellectual power. 

Power is far more than the narrow conception of it which was extolled by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: namely, the 'will to power' which drives us to achieve.  Rather, it is to be found in all the ordinary moments of life.  And this is not who we may yet become, but who we are. 
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
–William Shakespeare

_______________________________

A single post does not permit a survey of the many aspects and examples of power.  Author Gregory Kyle Klug unfolds further thoughts on the subject at The Philosopher and at What is Power?

12 July 2015

The Art of War? Obama's Machiavellian Foreign Policy

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” 
- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)


Is Obama a foreign policy genius - a modern day Machiavelli - or an inept ingénue

Consider some recent and some ongoing cases.

1. During the US presidential election campaign, Barack Obama mocked his opponent, Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was a threat  - opting instead to forgive Russia past transgressions, press the restart button and have 'business as usual' relations. China, he asserted, was the real threat, even as Chinese money kept the US economy afloat.

Yet, as has widely been pointed out, the Russian military interventions in Ukraine, which have led to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and to the entrenchment of separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, directly challenge the post-Cold War consensus. Eastern Ukraine follows on other more tentative land-grabs, and in turn will be followed by greater prizes - Estonia, Lithuania… And if incursions there show the NATO lion cannot roar, why not further?

2. In Syria, faced with a choice between supporting the moderate rebels, and leaving the extremists to take over, he opted for the latter policy - with the result that the Assad government recovered lost ground and ISIS became a regional force. Originally, U.S. intelligence saw the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset. Now though, as David Kilcullen, the US military strategist said to have saved Iraq through the 'surge' has put it:
'Western countries have a clear interest in destroying ISIS, but counter-insurgency should not even be under discussion. This is a straight-up conventional fight against a state-like entity, and the goal should be to utterly annihilate ISIS as a state.' 
Just unfortunate then that ISIS has now become a force that would require a greater military effort than that of the original Iraq war. Your move, Professor!

3. But it is in Ukraine that his judgements seem most dangerous. Obama has apparently decided that there is no strategic significance to allowing Russia to annex parts of the former Soviet Union. Of course, the morality of this do not concern him - a man who says in one of his books that he learned his his ethics from the backs of cereal packets. In pursuit of this policy there have been so substantial sanctions, although there is a possibility that the US was involved in the Saudi policy of lowering the world price of oil - which has hurt the Russians. Under Obama there has been no access to arms and training, leaving the hopelessly amateurish and poorly equipped Ukrainian conscripts to be slaughtered in their thousands by the separatists backed by Russian special forces and the very best equipment that the Russians have.

4. In Egypt, Obama sided with the Egyptian military against the democracy movement, in due course helping to usher in a new and if anything even more vicious regime than that run by the US's client Hosni Mubarak.

5. As for the Palestine-Israel conflict, Obama has managed to present the US as both powerless and inept - threatening responses and laying down red lines which he never has any intention of following through on. The Israeli Prime Minster is encouraged to treat him with contempt.

6. And then, earlier this month, his international trade agenda was left in tatters after even the Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, voted against his plans to for a new bill, going directly against Obama less than three hours after the president begged his party’s caucus to support it.

7. Not to foget the War in Europe, entirely! The economic policies one between Greece and the Eurozone, that is.  Here, Obama weighed in on the side of Greece, ordering the rest of Europe to forgive its trangressions and, well, bend the Eurozone rules a little. Such advice might have been deeeply probematic for the Eurozone if followed - it certainly helped reduce the liklihood of the Greek's seeking a compromise. Result - this week - boom!

The fact is, Obama sees himself as a true Machiavellian Prince, one who presents one face to the world while acting in a quite different way in secret. He sees himself as enhancing US geopolitical and structural power; strengthening the American identity (hence the oft-repeated determination to stop the torture programme and release the extra-judicial prisoners such as those held at Guantanamo,  policies he has no intention of genuinely carrying out) and the search for domestic political consolidation.

According to former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski:
'He’s not a softy. But he’s a person who tries to think through these events so you can draw some long-term conclusions.'
The longterm consequence of policy in the Middle East seems likely to be polarisation - between a US-backed series of kleptocracies and ultra-Islamists. In Europe, it is likely to be a 'hot war' between the Western Europeans and the Russians. In general, Obama seems to be sowing the seeds of global chaos - but a chaos in which perhaps for some it can be imagined that Continental United States will be immune. If that is indeed his aim, it is certainly a piece of cynicism worthy of the Italian master himself.


Further, or is it backwards? reading here

Primary colours



05 July 2015

Picture Post No. 2: The Blue Dot


'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Martin Cohen

Image courtesy of NASA
There's a famous image, taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts, of the Earth as a swirling, 'blue marble' hovering over the desolate, grey soil of the Moon. The image is reputed to have created a new consciousness of humankind's fragility and transience - and inspired a new determination to look after our planet... Well, that didn't last long!

When I first saw the 'Blue Marble', to be honest, it didn't have any kind of effect on me. After all, I was familiar with the idea of planets in space, from numerous paintings and drawings - but this image just accidentally caught the Earth in the background.

Somehow, this time, I caught a hint of who those first space images might have changed perceptions back on Earth.


October 25th 2015 


Unfortunately, the original comments, from July 2015,  on this post are unable to be displayed -  for 'technical reasons'.

21 June 2015

Philosophers and Truthiness

By Matthew Blakeway

The comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness* . This is a way of mocking politicians who claim to know something intuitively but fail to put forward any evidence to support their assertion. Too often in political rhetoric, truthiness presents as fact what is merely an ideological belief – not a real truth, but a truth that we want to exist. As Colbert put it ‘Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.’

Over the last few weeks, academic economists have started the share the fun. The equivalent term that Paul Romer coined to mock his less-than-rigorous colleagues is mathiness. This, he says, is an argument that looks like robust mathematics and sounds like robust mathematics, but actually isn’t. Sloppy economists create arguments that use terms that are mathematically defined elsewhere but which have subtly different meanings in the argument presented. In this way, an ideological position (e.g. if welfare is cut, the unemployed will all find jobs) can be presented as a solid economic argument. As Romer says: 
‘Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it.’ 
Mathematical theories, like those created by academic economists, should only be trusted when each term is precisely defined and consistently used. Only then can the conclusions of such arguments be empirically demonstrated to be either true or false. The example that he gives is growth theory, where competing versions all appear to be clearly stated, yet show no converging consensus.

And now that creating words to mock woolly thinking is in danger of becoming an epidemic. It occurs to me that the humanities need one of their own. Or, as Stephen Colbert might say, ‘truthiness’ and ‘mathiness’ just don’t feel right in our context. So I propose that we adopt the word ‘explaininess’ because I think this is a problem that is pervasive throughout writing in philosophy and human sciences. Explaininess is an intellectual Ponzi scheme where one nebulous notion is needed to explain another nebulous notion, but the cumulative whole is presented as an explanation.



For example, in connection with a current project of mine, I recently spent a two miserable weeks reading all the recent academic theories explaining various forms of mental illness. In one paper summarising four theories of borderline personality disorder, I was left struggling to succinctly state the difference between Theory B and Theory C. These used terms like ‘maternal imprinting’, ‘suppressed memory’, ‘learned anxiety’ and ‘secondary emotion’. At least an example was given for the last one: anger turns to shame. But I was left asking: is that normal? I certainly don’t think it happens that way with me, so if we are to talk about how that happens at all, we at least need a box and arrow diagram with meaningful things in the boxes and understandable causal relationships. Otherwise, the existence of secondary emotions is questionable and their causality is entirely unknown. Yet in the world of explaininess, this is a theory of a mental illness where competing theories don’t converge towards consensus because none of them are empirically verifiable.

In philosophy, explaininess is rampant. A particularly egregious example is Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, based around two terms that Derrida coined differance and presance. These are two perfectly reasonable words intentionally misspelt by just one letter. Geddit? But he tells us that these terms can’t be defined; so how am I supposed to know that my understanding of them is the same as his? After a period of hair-tearing frustration, I was reassured to discover that Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault had both stated that they didn’t understand it either. In this case, if you admit you don’t understand it, then you are in more elite company than if you pretend that you do.

Derrida is famous for his obscurity, but explaininess exists everywhere in philosophy. There are hundreds of books on ‘freewill’, for another example, but few of them offer a robust hypothesis as to what it is. If you are writing a book claiming that this concept is useful, then the burden falls on you to explain to your readers what it is. Too often, writers just presume that I understand the term, but actually I don’t. If freewill is a piece of brain hardware, then that is alright because eventually a neuroscientist will find it in the hypothalamus or somewhere. And if it is a piece of mental software, then eventually some mathy person will build a model of it so that we can all understand how it works; so that is all good as well. But if it is a part of your aura or something that is beamed to you through the aether, then I suggest that some academic philosophers should be seeking alternative employment. Oh, the joys of tenure!

The problem is that if we ban explaininess in philosophy, then there isn’t much left for us to talk about. But I think this points to the real objective of philosophy. Too often, people say that philosophy’s role is to ask questions, but it ends up with us talking ad infinitum about all the questions that can’t be answered – the things that scientists can’t be bothered with. If, on the other hand, philosophy’s objective is to answer questions, then we would all have given up in the 3rd century BC, by which time it was already clear that almost no progress would be made in concrete terms. My suggestions is that the objective of philosophy should be to take unanswerable questions and try to change them into ones that can be addressed in a scientific fashion. For example, if nobody can tell us what freewill actually is, then maybe we should change the question into ‘what is the cause of a human action?’ Already that is starting to sound like a scientific question, rather than a philosophical one. I'd say, pull off that trick, and true progress will have been made.



* More on 'Truthiness'  and on 'Mathiness' - as a PDF*


30 March 2015

Plato, Democritus and Alternative Medicine

Could the history of philosophy, and in particular the unresolved debate between Plato and Democritus, explain the present debate between alternative and conventional approaches to nature and health?


'Alternative Medicine' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "any of a range of medical therapies not regarded as orthodox by the medical profession", citing chiropractic, faith healing, herbalism, homeopathy and reflexology as examples. 1 Yet a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over one third of people preferred alternative medicine to conventional methods, citing the medical establishment's emphasis on diagnostic testing and drug treatments that did not consider the patient's well-being and health as a whole.2 Edzard Ernst, a Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter in the U.K puts usage even higher, saying that "about half the general population in developed countries use complementary and alternative medicine".3 And in some countries, notably China and India, what are considered 'alternative' treatments are central to government health strategies. 4 In fact, there are social and cultural dimensions to health policy as well as scientific and historical ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the response and acceptance of so-called 'alternative' health treatments.


Health as bodily harmony


The underlying assumptions of alternative medicine are that health is a state of bodily harmony or balance, and disease is a disharmony or imbalance 5 . This idea, central to traditional Chinese and Indian herbal treatments, is also present in the Western medical tradition, often taken as starting with Hippocrates. Hippocrates believed that the elements of good health were essentially environmental, such as a calm mental state, a balanced diet and physical exercise. Even that 'commonsense' health mantra of ‘fresh water, sunshine and exercise’ is by no means universal, it has its own social and cultural roots. 

Vitalis, the doctrine that the functions of a living organism cannot be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone, has a long history in medical philosophies. Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is sometimes referred to as the 'vital spark', 'energy' or élan vital, which some equate with the 'soul'. 

Most traditional healing practices propose that disease reflects some imbalance in those vital energies that distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition, these vital forces were identified as the four humours; Eastern traditions posit forces, such as qi, particularly important in conceptualising acupuncture and prana in Yoga. 

Philosophically speaking, the split between 'modern Western approaches and 'traditional, Eastern ones seems to have come about in the seventeenth century, around the time that René Descartes (1596-1650) split the world into two parts - the mental world of minds and the physical world of bodies - the theory known as 'dualism' and the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, described people as 'but an Artificial Animal, the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels'. (It is no coincidence that Descartes' Meditations starts with an account of the French philosopher's dissection of a monkey...) 

However, conventional medicine is seen to have split away from the 'bodily harmony' approach in the nineteenth century, particularly following the discovery of disease-carrying microbes - germs, viruses, bacteria and so on. Prior to this, medical practitioners in Europe shared what is sometimes called the 'humoural' model of the human body, but no one school had a monopoly of authority in health matters.

The Theory of the Four Humours

The humoural theory, developed by the Roman doctor [[Galen]], held that the four elements in nature - fire, air, water and earth - corresponded to four fluids in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Herbs were believed to positively affect the humours through four key properties: being hot, dry, cold or moist. Health was a matter of balancing the humours or ‘bodily juices’. 

Nonetheless, Europeans at this time were particularly open to new treatments that arrived from abroad as a result of trade in far-off and mysterious lands. 6 These were seen not merely as a response to a more fundamental bodily imbalance, but as the essential 'cause' of the imbalance. Hence they could be treated in isolation, usually through drugs. 

Where conventional medical treatment is seen as effective in dealing with certain 'emergencies', such as physical injuries, other long-term illnesses and bodily dysfunction's seem to many people to remain poorly understood and conventional treatments ineffective and even harmful. Another objection to conventional medicine is its emphasis on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'. Almost all health spending in Western countries is on the former - some 85% in the case of the United States - as opposed to the latter. 7

 

The importance of lifestyle


A report by the US Centers for Disease Control stated that 54%of heart disease, 37% of cancer and half of cerebrovascular and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) was preventable through changes in lifestyle. 8
 
As Roberta Bivins puts it, in Alternative Medicine - A History, "medical practices are typically culturally specific - that is, they are internally coherent with and respond to practically the cultures in which they initially developed". Bivens puts it thus: "The incorporation of dissection in to medical training and knowledge production was clearly integrated with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and empiricism." And today, recent advocates of 'enlightenment thinking' invariably cite examples of treatment by Alternative Health practitioners as dire evidence of the spread of 'irrationality". Yet how rational is say, modern medicine, and how irrational are alternative remedies? If, according to World Health Organisation figures, in the 30 years from 1967 to 1998, just under 6000 ‘adverse events’ world-wide can be traced back to the prescription of herbal and other alternative medicines, this figure can only be contrasted with those from a University of Toronto study in 1998 which found that there were at least 106 000 fatalities each year, in the US alone, from side-effects of officially sanctioned and proved drugs.9
    The Right to Culturally Appropriate Healthcare
     
      The World Health Organization determines four criteria for the adequate delivery of health care and the realization of the highest attainable standard of health: Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Quality (AAAQ)
       
      Acceptability : All health facilities, goods and services must be respectful of medical ethics and culturally appropriate, as well as sensitive to gender and life-cycle requirements. 1
However, anatomical dissection is opposed to the social values of Confucian China and Buddhist India, contributing to the continued acceptance of 'alternative medicine' in these cultures and conversely the added resistance to it in the West. 11 Equally, approaches such as acupuncture and moxabustion were in harmony with the philosophical beliefs of the East, but opposed to those of the West. Central to both techniques is "an immense pharmacopoeia, a detailed disease classification system and a set of body-maps" which define relationships between the body's organs and systems, as mediated by a circulatory system "that moves both tangible and intangible substances" around the body. In particular, the strange (to Western eyes) concept of qi.
    At certain points on the body's surface, the various vessels or channels through which these fluids move, and which connect different functional and sensory organs, can be stimulated, thereby altering the flows of qi within them and between the organs. In moxabustion, this is done through the medium of small cones of fibre (extracted from the leaves of Artemisia vulgaris or mugwort) that are burnt on top of the points. In acupuncture, needles, inserted to different depths and sometimes manipulated, are the means of intervention 12
The mystical lore of plants crosses virtually every cultural boundary. For example, according to Kathleen Karlsen, MA , an advocate of herbal medicine, a 60,000 year old burial site excavated in Iraq included eight different medicinal plants. 13

"This evidence of the spiritual significance of plants is echoed around the globe”, she adds. In Europe, works such as Pliny’s ‘’Natural History’’, which describes the supposed properties of plants gathered from numerous cultural traditions including the herbal practices of the Celtic Druids, and Dioscorides’ ‘’De Materia Medica’’ , which is a work regarded by some as the cornerstone of modern botany and by herbalists today as a key pharmaceutical guide. But the Romans were not the first.
    In ancient times, healing formulas existed for almost every known disease. Specific conditions were treated with a variety of methods such as tinctures, teas and compresses or by inhaling the rejuvenating fragrances of essential oils. 14
Indeed, as Kathleen Karlsen also notes, “Shamanistic medicine, alive and well in traditional societies today, often incorporates the use of hallucinogenic plants which enable the herbal practitioner to reach unseen realms to obtain higher knowledge and guidance. “ 

The esoteric wisdom of ancient healers and of plant lore has been central to medicine since ancient times, not only spawning approaches such as herbalism, traditional Chinese medicine, biofeedback, and homeopathy, but also influencing mainstream approaches to illness. These approaches draw upon general theories, such as the 'theory of similars' or the related 'theory of signatures'. 

For instance, the onion was favoured by the Egyptians not only as a food, and used as a medicine, but also respected for reflecting their view of the universe's multi-layered structure. Egyptians identified medicinal properties in plants such as myrrh, aloe, peppermint, garlic and castor oil. Healing plants are also featured extensively in ancient Arabian lore, in the Bible, and in the druidic tradition of the ancient Celts. Herbal tradtions were central to life in the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations, and north American Indian herbal rituals. 

The medical use of plants by the ancient Greeks reflected their idea that each of the twelve primary gods had characteristic plants. Such approaches are clearly methodologically incompatible with conventional medicine, to say the least. The US Food and Drug Administration strictly patrols claims made for herbal medicine, to prevent medical claims being made to promote them. On the other hand, herbs lacking such elevated 'connections', such as parsley, thyme, fennel and celery were allowed correspondingly more everyday roles in health, and are to many today more easily accepted as having 'health-giving' properties.

 

 Different languages for discussing health


(That's 'tea' on the left...)

One way to approach the debate (and lack of debate) between alternative and conventional approaches to health and biology is by comparing their two languages and trying to find proper translations, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, and acknowledge when there is incommensurability:
    Incommensurability thus becomes a sort of untranslatability', localized to one or another area in which two lexical taxonomies differ ... Members of one community can acquire the taxonomy employed by members of another, as the historian does in learning to understand old texts. But the process which permits understanding produces bilinguals, not translators ... The bilingual must always remember within which community discourse is occurring. 15
Alternative medicine operates under a holist paradigm. It tries to identify shapes, as in the doctrine of signatures, and make them "resonate", as in homeopathy, which lies on the law of similars. It should be reminded that Plato, when he conceived the notion of Ideas, was also referring to the notion of shape (eidolon, from which "idea" comes, also means shape or structure).

Shape and symbol


Does science have, in its own terms, a way to account for shapes in nature?
 
Conventional medicine, of course, is concerned with shapes, as exemplified by our modern icons : the double helix (DNA), the key-lock model of chemical messenger-receptor action, and the more elaborate 3D protein simulations that fascinate most of us. However, although molecular biochemistry is entirely based on the shape of proteins, molecules and electron clouds around nuclei, it would be erroneous to assume that molecular biochemistry covers all shapes and forms found in the living universe. It is not its purpose, because it operates with the worldview of logical reductionism.

Under this paradigm, it is believed (but not provable) that, by reducing life to its most fundamental components, by analyzing all its details, it will be possible to account for the observed universe.
The alternative view (which was the conventional view before the Enlightenment), on the contrary, adopts a phenomenological perspective. Observing that one plant, because of its shape, evokes an image, an idea, or an impression, the alternative-minded practitioner will immediately use it as a tool to discover occurrences of this Idea in the sick or healthy body or mind. 

'Magical thinking' will link the appearance of the St-John's Wort flower with hope or happiness because of its unexpected yellow colour, or the concentric organization of the onion with the orderly organization of the cosmos. Nonsense? 

This analogical thinking is prevalent in dreams and normal thought processes, but it is not accceptable in scientific discourse, where it is condemned as dangerous and fallacious. Yet could it be that the active molecules of the St-John's Wort and the onion do deliver a message, through the algebra of organic molecules? 


  • 1Oxford English Dictionary, ninth edition 1996
  • 2Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 3
  • 3 in a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia - Ernst E. "Obstacles to research in complementary and alternative medicine." Medical Journal of Australia, 2003; 179 (6): 279-80 available at [WWW]http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_06_150903/ern10442_fm-1.html
  • 4 "In 1948, the Committee by Planning Commission in 1951 and the Homoeopathic Pharmacopoeia Committee in 1962 testify to this. At the instance of the recommendation of these Committees, the Government of India have accepted Homoeopathy as one of the national System of Medicine and started releasing funds for its development" from [WWW]http://indianmedicine.nic.in/html/homoeopathy/homoe.htm accessed December 16 2008
  • 5Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 6
  • 6 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins, Oxford University Press 2007, p46
  • 7 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg, Celestial Arts, 2002, page 4
  • 8 Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, Burton Goldberg (Celestial Arts, 2002) page 4
  • 9As catalogued, wittily in The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It by Dan Hind, Verso, 2007.
  • 10 [www.who.int/entity/mediacentre/factsheets/fs323_en.pdf Joint fact sheet WHO/OHCHR/323], August 2007
  • 11 Alternative Medicine?: A History by Roberta Bivins p44
  • 12Alternative Medicine?: A History, by Roberta Bivins p45
  • 13 Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology, James L. Pearson, Rowman Altamira, 2002 p. 114 ISBN 0759101566, 9780759101562 [WWW]Google books
  • 14 [WWW]http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/infoherbalmedicine.html accessed December 16th 2008
  • 15 Kuhn, Thomas S. (1990) [WWW]Anno%20Kuhn%20The%20Road%20after%20Structure%201990.htm 'The Road since Structure'. Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers