Category Archives: Philosophy

Undetected (and Detectable) Shadows of Positions

Philosophy

Or should our title recognize positions of shadows rather than shadows of positions?

On any of the contentious issues of our day, we hear advocates for each of the contending positions engaging advocates for the alternative positions.  Each advocate presents the reasons for and against a given position, with whatever information, conviction and persuasive capabilities the advocate can bring to bear.

We listen to the advocates; we hear their dueling contentions; and we often are inclined to make up our minds by throwing up our hands. Inclined, yes. But dare we abandon our dignity and cede our responsibility to look with a cold eye, and gentle heart, at the facts and choices.  Dare we leave unexamined the prior choices that have constrained the choices we seemingly have, as if these prior choices are a knot with threads too tight and patterns too intertwined to ever unravel?  Dare we abdicate our individual responsibilities by conferring on the dueling and (occasionally) sincere advocates an expertise that stretches well beyond their expertise and lures us to accept their positions?

Let’s pause, for a moment, and consider whether all may not be as it seems.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the advocates of contending views adopt their respective stances on common ground.  Indeed, it would surely qualify as irony if the grounds claimed by each provided firmer terrain for the other.  And through our inspection, we seize our ground and own our responsibility to face the choices and their consequences, knowing they are ours, knowing that we must and (must continually) choose, and choose again. The moment of pause is not a moment of rest.

To be concrete, we’ll take the death penalty, a gruesome spectacle cloaked in sterile metaphor and shrouded in sanitized statistics, as an example.

The contenders on the death penalty, whether in support or opposition, invoke a variety of reasons, often prioritized and weighted differently, and commonly consisting of conclusions presented as reasons:

– the death penalty risks permanent injustice if we execute an innocent person.

– the death penalty is applied in a discriminatory (racial) manner.

– the death penalty brutalizes the society that legitimizes it (and brutalizes the doctors, nurses, wardens and other “administrators” that insert the syringe, pull the switch, unleash the guillotine, erect and dismantle the gallows, and “remove” the limp, disfigured carcass that once was a body).

– the botched execution is cruel and unusual.

– the death penalty is true justice – an eye for an eye.

– the death penalty is an effective deterrent against (certain?) crimes.

– the death penalty assures that the offender will not repeat his heinous crime.

– the visible spectacle of an execution gives expression to society’s rage and thereby dissipates impulses toward vigilante revenge.

The above is an incomplete list.  Many other reasons have been asserted in support of different positions. And, of course, we have not touched on side-issues that, sooner or later, take center stage: which crimes (if any) should merit the death penalty (if we were to have such a penalty); what should be the burden of proof for imposition of the death penalty; what should be the rights of appeal for a conviction; what are the permissible “techniques” for carrying out the death penalty; should there be a minimum age for eligibility to receive the death penalty; how should jurors be picked in capital cases? Further removed: who should decide the legitimacy of the death penalty?  Who is the “we” in the questions above?  Why should we legitimize objectionable actions (e.g., vigilante revenge) as a predicate (rhetorical or otherwise) to legitimizing the death penalty? If the death penalty violates human rights, should we seek a universal ban?  Or would pursuit of such a goal squander scarce resources better spent reforming our own judicial and penal systems?

But what if it were the case that those opposed to the death penalty actually have a greater desire for revenge and punishment than those who support the death penalty? How could this (paradox?) be?  One answer could be – although it may not in fact be – that those opposed to the death penalty think (feel? believe?) that locking a person in a secure cage for the rest of his life is a greater punishment. If we set aside how one measures the severities of different forms of punishment – is there a common denominator for measuring severity? – and whether the recipients (subjects) of the punishment (as well as the administrators of, and audience for, the punishment) share in their views as to severities – and what if they (or some of them?) don’t – and focus on the beliefs in and of themselves of the public contenders, then one may sense the grounds start to vibrate and shift.

Do we assume that achievement of the sought-after objective leaves all else unchanged?  As if change can be effected in a vacuum.  To overturn the death penalty and (thereby?) encourage increased impositions of, and increased severity of, other penalties would, one presumes, be an unintended consequence.  After all, it would be the rare opponent of the death penalty who would countenance a lower standard of proof or greater procedural bars to appeals of convictions.  Or so one would think. But do those of us who hold a particular view factor in the second and third level consequences?  Is the posing of this question asking too much?  Can our uncertainties in knowing the answers inhibit convictions in our positions?  Reader, read  Sarat’s Gruesome Spectacles, read the Federal bureau of statistics and then read more.

Shadows of positions? Positions of shadows?

That was Then (and Now): War, Poetry and Human Nature

Philosophy, Poetry

History, as presented through historians, is the accumulation of selected data, woven into overlapping, contradictory, reinforcing, alternative, independent narratives. We animate the narratives through our individual, evolving, understandings. The scope of history is as broad as everything and as narrow as something (or someone). As students, we shape the shapes presented and represented by historians.

Akin to history, particularly the historical narrative of a participant in the events within the narration, poetry, a poem, kindles our imaginations, our imaging, of realities without images, without physical representations, other than those birthed out of our imagings. Through excursions through poems, composed through centuries, and across the globe, we can track unbroken threads, chords, that link descendants to ancestors, and that join, introduce, past to present.

All life is mortal and death is ubiquitous. But organized killing, sanctioned or not, by the state or by appeal to a higher (or lower) authority, if at times seemingly ubiquitous, is never inevitable. And, yet, killing runs unbroken from dawn to dusk.

Reading a recently published anthology of war poems, poems of, on, about, war, from the dawn of the printing press, or quill, ink and papyrus, to a dusk that eludes our grasp, we observe (no, we imagine, we image, we see, we feel, we hear) how some things, and each of us, “never change.” To paraphrase Norman Maclean, eventually all things merge into one and a poem runs through it.

Humility and Brilliance: a Postscript

Economics, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Uncategorized

Having moved on to the activities of today, I was pleasantly struck by an Opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Titled “A Nobel Economist’s Caution About Government,” the piece quotes from the great Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really  know about what they imagine they can design.”

While I suspect the authors of the piece have not visited our Blog, the themes our readers have come to expect from us resonate in the articulation by the authors of the risks of certainty in an inherently uncertain world.

We close with (what else?) but a closing thought: Those who relegate poetry to the idlings of idiosyncratic daydreamers deprive themselves of the riches of ambiguity and expose themselves to a deceptive clarity that leads to unintended consequences and ossification.

Humility and Brilliance

Philosophy, Rhetoric

Except when describing diamonds and freshly painted metals, except, that is, when used as a synonym for shining, brilliance is a metaphor used to indicate extreme intelligence. A quality that distinguishes the brilliant from the dull, the flat, the undifferentiated.

Whether used as noun, verb or adverb, humility and its derivatives and variants are, in their essence, animated solely through reference to the relationship of a person or the person’s activities to those of another. One is not humble before a rock. One is not humble (although one may be insecure or tentative) in private. One cannot humble herself before a mirror, although humility before another presupposes one’s prior gaze at, and into, the mirror and one’s reflection on the reflection. As water and oxygen promote germination of seeds, love promotes germination of humility, which takes root in one’s cognition and recognition of the views of others and the uncertainties that are fundamental, inescapable, impervious to shouts, no matter the volume.

Commentators who have endured through the ages, with universal appeal to our common qualities, have observed the inseparability of brilliance (as in extremely intelligent, differentiated from the crowd) and humility. Montaigne, translated loosely, captures the fusion through playful irony: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we know least.” Or, in the wit of Mark Twain: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” Or through the rhythm of Pope: “Much was Believ’d, but little understood, And to be dull was constru’d to be good…”

Now, hesitancy, tentativeness, may indeed reflect a dullard but it does not follow, in logic or experience, that unequivocal conviction reflects brilliance. Indeed, the history of thought has been an endless stream of visions and revisions, paradigm shifts, and adaptation to unforeseen (and often unforeseeable) consequences.

With the foregoing, paradoxically, being my firm conviction about the inherent flaws in and of firm convictions, one must marvel at the prominence we provide to, and the deference we display towards, those who are frequently wrong but never in doubt. My recommendation: beware of the man who holds the crystal ball, who loudly proclaims questions as if they were settled conclusions, who glibly dismisses counterpoints as beside the (i.e., his) point, who preaches his objectivity and neutrality, who uses his voice to stifle and his pen to censor, who confounds consensus and coercion.

We conclude with a quote from Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:

“But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow,
Still pleas’d to teach, and not proud to know?
Unbiassed or by Favour or by Spite;
Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right;
Tho’ Learn’d well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?
Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe?
Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d;
A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind;
Gen’rous Converse; a Sound exempt from Pride;
And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side?”

 

Poetry and the End of Life

Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric

At deeper levels, conventional analytics and conventional wisdom are, at once, coercive and liberating. We’ll leave this apparent paradox for another day. But before we leave, let’s stake out a position: within, and outside of, the boundaries of the sciences and humanities and transcending (or indifferent to) the border between them resides poetic imagination: the imagination expressed in, and offered to us, by, through and in, our engagement with the poem.  The imagination planted by another and that kindles our own.  The imagination that takes optical microscopy into the nanodimension. What other human expression animates our imagination by inviting us, gently and with no expectation of reciprocity, and when our spirit moves us, when we stir, to engage and explore and bring what we find, in the introspection and through our self-inspection, to enrich our appreciation of ambiguity, frailty, insecurity, fear of the unknown and craving for sustenance in the face of our mortality. To displace our fears and harness the energy of displacement to foster and fortify resolve.

In a recent post we encouraged health care providers to develop, to practice, imaginative empathy. To minister to the patient with an acute awareness of, and compassion for, the person, the person who is, or will be, us, the person who has moved from the island of health to the island of illness. The person whose movement will soon have moved him to the past.

When the surgeon has left, when the lights have been dimmed, when the birds have flown, where will the dying find comfort?  How will the care-giver who has not looked deeply into himself, who has not explored and made peace with, death and the fear of dying, soothe the soul and fortify the spirits when fortification and sustenance are all that we ask for and what we need most?

Imaginative Empathy

Philosophy

Many of our earlier pieces address, implicitly, the role of empathetic imagination in the enhancement of palliative care, broadly construed. Through our active imagination of the feelings of another (the other’s anxieties, aspirations, complacencies and frustrations) we enrich and deepen our responsive empathy, which in turn enables our provision of care tailored to the individual. And the individual’s recognition of the tailoring of the care animates and sustains the therapeutic benefits of the care.

With this in mind, we compliment The New England Journal for a piece in this week’s edition: “Becoming a Physician: Rethinking the Social History.” We cannot over-emphasize the value in the exhortation of the importance, in continuing medical education, of contextualization of patient care to promote satisfactory and satisfying health outcomes. The piece encourages, through illustration, an education that “elucidates how patients’ environments influence their attitudes and behaviors and how patients’ agency — the ability to act in accordance with their free choice — is constrained by challenging social environments.”

Whether or not we are physicians, we are social beings commonly called upon, by ourselves and by others, to provide palliative care in the broadest sense, and our cultivation of imaginative empathy in ourselves and our support for its cultivation in others hold prospects for increased well-being, with no harmful, and many helpful, side-effects for all concerned.

Inevitability at the Brink

Philosophy, Rhetoric

Around us, surrounding us, decisions and revisions to decisions abound. Invariably we decide “at the margin” based on where we are.  But how is it that we are where we are at decision-time, with our choices seemingly constrained by circumstances?

Now the above may strike us as  ponderous – at best – but a recognition of  its implications for public policy and comity, within and across borders, within and between groups,  is essential to an understanding that the choices presented to us, given to us, or selected by us from the data at hand, themselves reflect and emerge out of prior choices; and this emergence (ancestry) complicates and presses the moral imperative that we challenge ourselves to challenge choices at the moment.

The choices within the range, at the moment of choice, ought not to obfuscate the links that tie choices to choices.  We may need to take the past as we find it today, but we would be wise to appreciate that tomorrow’s past is today’s responsibility.

 

That’s What I Meant

Philosophy

While stepping up and down, and huffing and puffing, on a stair master at the gym, and reading this week’s New York Review of Books, a stanza from a poem I read in 1982 surfaced. Through my faulty memory I recall the stanza as:

–‘Tis hard to venture where our betters fail,
— Or lend fresh interest to a twice told tale;
— Any yet, perchance, ’tis wiser to prefer,
— A hackneyed plot then choose a new and err.

These lines reverberated as I found myself thinking, as I was reading the NY Review, “That’s what I meant. Oh, how he or she has written what I would have written had I the faculties and skill to organize and express my thoughts with such precision and grace.”

And, then, exhilaration at reading what seemed to be an excavation and presentation of latent thoughts, hidden and ineffable within my inner musings, began to sap my enthusiasm for venturing to express what predecessors and contemporaries have expressed before. The anxiety of influence? The urge for novelty? Could it be that what I have written is both good and original but, to paraphrase Johnson, the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good?

But, wait. Descent and subsistence come too soon. Our dignity, our individuality and inescapable autonomy, our will to assert, to act, to be a part, emerges, re-surges, and then reverses descent into lethargy, replaces lassitude, and propels ascent toward engagement, challenge and renewal.

Let others shrink before, and defer to, the received wisdom. I’ll take engagement any time.

Where We End Depends on Where We Begin – Ebola and International Reciprocity

Economics, Philosophy

Our observations on, and judgments of, human affairs depend, heavily, on how we frame and re-frame the subject(s) of our inquiry, and on the data we select, either purposefully or without recognition, to inform and support our views. The gravity and importance of this point bear vocalization, particularly because of forces (whether or not well-meaning) that obscure the role of selection among non-pre-ordained alternatives that, once selected, appear to lead inexorably to a conclusion cloaked in an objectivity that conceals the (un-selected) underlying alternatives.

An article in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine – “Ebola in a Stew of Fear” – powerfully relates the linkages of advances in Western medicine and healthcare to illnesses and their ravages elsewhere. I quote from the article:

“It was, in fact, a 1926 Harvard medical expedition to Liberia, undertaken on behalf of Firestone, that had brought my film team to the Liberia–Guinea border in 2014….. In 1926, the eight-member team had traveled for 4 months through the Liberian interior, collecting blood, tumors, urine, and photographs of diverse ethnic groups. Some people ran away when they saw these strangers. The routes the expedition traveled were those used by European and West African slave traders, white missionaries, and Liberian soldiers recently sent to conquer the interior. Why stick around when strangers had been such potent contributors to the local ecology of fear?…..

American medical research profited from the blood, parasites, and viruses collected on these expeditions. Such materials were the stuff of Nobel Prizes, professional prestige and fame, and medical breakthroughs that benefited people throughout the world. The 1951 Nobel Prize awarded to Max Theiler, a member of the 1926 Harvard expedition, for his work on a yellow fever vaccine, is one example. But biomedical research did little in return to help build medical knowledge and public health capacity within Liberia. When Liberian friends now post on Facebook links connecting the Ebola outbreak to past American biomedical research, they point to the history and memory of exploitation and extraction that run deep in West Africa. These roots of medical extraction in Africa contribute to the ecology of fear.

Modern medicine owes a debt to West Africans for past sacrifices made in the advancement of global health. This week’s announcement by President Barack Obama of a U.S. commitment to build 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, train medical workers, provide testing kits, and offer logistic support is a welcome and needed response. It should be the start of a long-term, concerted effort to strengthen the public health infrastructure, which is critical to the region’s future stability.”

When we consider our “foreign aid,” we would do well to bear in mind that our aid is not a one-way street and the very conceptualization of “aid”, insofar as it connotes unilateral assistance, ought not to obscure the fundamental, tangible, and very real reciprocity that precedes and supports, enables and perpetuates, foreign aid.

Questioning the Every Day

Philosophy, Rhetoric

We would render ourselves inert if we were to question most of what we take for granted. But the very phrase “take for granted” presupposes our acceptance of many fundamentals granted to us by someone or something else. If a core component of power is found in one’s ability to control another, then the ultimate power is a control whose influence is so deep and pervasive as to be unnoticed by the controlled subjects. How would they bridle against, yet alone revolt against, things that they take for granted? How would they question the status quo if it is “just the way things are”?

Now, we might challenge the foregoing observations as over-broad, further observing that natural phenomenon are indeed just the way things are. The sun always rises. But notwithstanding the challenge, and giving it its full due, we can recognize that many of life’s everyday understandings and practices are not embedded in a fixed, mechanical reality. Of course, blind faith and ubiquity, and the pressing demands and inclinations to “get along,” limit our recognitions.

Once we accept the gist of the above, we can begin a (necessarily selective) consideration of the power trade-offs reflected in the every-day practices that we take for granted.

What are the origins of practices ranging from (1) what we eat and do not (such as prohibitions on pork or beef consumption); (2) historic persecution of witches; (3) criticisms of pornography, drugs, etc., (4) the scope of criminal sanctions, (5) allocations of government dollars, (6) fashion in clothes, (7) heaven and hell.

Pausing to consider who benefits and who does not from any given practice is vital to promoting and enriching our individual freedoms and to holding ourselves, our institutions and organizations accountable.