Philosophical bugs

It's interesting how references to animals show up in philosophy. Plato put in a good word for some dogs in The Republic, comparing their traits of bravery and loyalty to guardians of the ideal city.

Hegel remarked that the owl of Minerva (Roman name for the Greek wisdom goddess Athena) "spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." I take that to mean that we mostly figure things out when they are over--or when it's too late.

Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak we couldn't understand him (I disagree with him for reasons elaborated here).

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay about foxes and hedgehogs, quoting a Greek poet as saying that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

I recently stumbled on another philosophical animal reference from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) from his New Organon:

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

I don't usually think of myself as a Bacon fan, but that is a pretty good way of stating the need for balance between data and perspective.

Plus, bugs are cool.

Who is just?

El Cabrero is on the run and under the weather today, but I did manage to find this great quotation from Plato. I think it's a keeper.

...he who really and naturally reveres justice and really hates  injustice is discovered in his dealings with that class of men to whom he can easily be unjust.

 You really can tell a lot about people by how they treat the less fortunate. Worst of all are those who grovel to those above and terrorize those below.

Unleashing the beast

I try to be a fairly not too terrible person most days, at least when people are looking. But certain things unleash the beast within, effecting a Jeckyll and Hyde transformation in a matter of seconds.

One such thing is the game of Scrabble. Now it so happened that this weekend we had a house full of kids who  asked to play the game. One had played it before but two second graders, including my grandson, were new to the game. I explained to my grandson that in this family Scrabble is not a game but a martial art in which no mercy or quarter is shown to one's opponents. Although I didn't use these exact words, I indirectly implied something to the effect that the goal is to crush one's opponents and drink from their skulls, metaphorically speaking.

We played a game and I attempted to instruct the beginners and help them with their words along the way. But when the scores were tallied...what can I say? In Dylan's words, "I can't help it if I'm lucky."

The other adults present pointed out that I was exulting in the defeat of two 8 year olds and a 12 year old. I pointed out, however, that this is the same mathematically as defeating a 28 year old. Besides, it was Scrabble.

Which means it was on.

POVERTY, WELFARE REFORM AND EVERYTHING AFTER discussed here.

A HUNTING WE DID GO. Early humans, that is.

PLATO AND EXERCISE discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pendulums

For most of the 20th century, disciplines like sociology and anthropology emphasized culture as the main shaper of human behavior and were skeptical of suggestions of biological or genetic influences on human social life.

They had some reason on their side. Anyone who thinks human nature is fixed by heredity has a lot explaining to do about our species' variability across time and space. Also, many previous attempts to bridge the gap between biology and society were suspect on many grounds.

So-called Social Darwinists misused Darwin's ideas to justify cut-throat unregulated capitalism in the Victorian era. Eugenics was the rage on both the right and left up until the mid 20th century. Racists and imperialists misused "science" to reinforce their bias and social positions. The Nazi movement imagined a struggle for existence between races. No wonder people wanted to focus on culture.

Lately, with growing knowledge in the fields of biology and genetics, things have begun to change. Biological determinism is still out as a catch-all explanation for social life, but there seems to be a greater willingness to consider the genetic bases of at least some behavior at the group and individual level.

More on this to come.

STATING THE OBVIOUS is a good thing these days. Here's another op-ed on the need for more action to create jobs. Krugman throws in his two cents here.

INTERESTING DEVELOPMENT. Massey executives went deep into the Upper Big Branch mine shortly after the disaster, which raises lots of questions.

FRAME THIS. Here's George Lakoff on politics, morality and messaging.

TAX THIS. Here are some reasons why raising taxes on the wealthiest makes sense.

PLATO, POP CULTURE AND VIDEO GAMES here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Platonism of the left, the wilding on the right

El Cabrero tries not to rant too much here about things that get on my last nerve, but I may indulge myself a bit today. My topic of choice is what I've come to think of as the Platonism of the left.

Plato, of course, was a great Greek philosopher and student of Socrates. He wrote brilliant and often charming dialogues that have influenced thought for 23 centuries or so--so much so that Alfred North Whitehead famously referred to Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." I've fallen under his spell more than once myself.

But thinkers from Nietzsche to Karl Popper have pointed out the dark sides of Platonic thought. For Nietzsche, he represented pure decadence for devaluing the material world in favor of the realm of forms or ideas. For Popper, he was an advocate of a closed society.

Platonizing has become a verb or sorts, which at the broadest level means to imitate his thought. At it's worst, it can mean believing that one's own ideas or models of the world are more real than the world itself.

I think the Platonism of the Left has surfaced during the health care reform debate. Some "progressive" people would apparently prefer an imaginary perfect bill which had no chance of getting anywhere to an imperfect real one that will make a huge difference for many Americans.

I don't mind if people would prefer to live in an imaginary world--as long as they don't mess up the real one.

Meanwhile, there's also the Whackadoodleism of the right. See below...

MORE UGLY. Some representatives who voted for health care reform have received death threats. What exactly is in that tea, anyway?

IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES until somebody cuts a propane line. The FBI is investigating an incident involving a cut gas line at the home of the brother of Virginia Democratic Congressman Thomas Perriello after his address was published in a Tea Party blog which urged the faithful to visit the place and express their feelings about his vote in favor of health care reform.

AND STILL MORE. One might think that after the wave of name calling, vandalism, death threats, and other fun and games that right wing leaders would try to tone down the rhetoric. Sarah Palin appears not to have gotten the memo (if one existed) however. In a recent tweet, she wrote

Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!"

Read more here.

WHATEVER HAPPENED to the old conservatism?

FALLOUT. A group of evangelical Christians have responded to Glen Beck's assertion that the idea of social justice is communist/Nazi. (One sometimes wonders whether those who assert the Whackadoodle equation of communism and Nazism may have dozed during their history of World War II classes.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The first ring

Plato got there first. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been musing this week about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and its practical applications for people interested in social justice (short version: there are some). It occurred to me, though, that part of the inspiration for Tolkien's epic came from an ancient work of Greek philosophy.

I'm referring to Plato's Republic, a long dialogue about the nature of justice that moves from the individual to the state. It's full of memorable images and stories or myths and one of these is the myth of Gyges.

In the discussion, Glaucon, Plato's brother, imagines a situation in which it would be hard for anyone to be just--a situation in which he or she has absolute power thanks to finding a magical ring. He tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia in what is now Turkey:

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.

Gyges found that the ring gave him the power of invisibility whenever he turned it on his finger. (There are times when I wouldn't mind having one of those.) Anyhow, Gyges arranges to visit the palace and with the help of the ring he seduces the queen, kills the king and becomes the ruler and ancestor of the fabulously wealthy King Croesus (search this blog for his story).

In Glaucon's view, such a ring of power would corrupt anyone:

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

Sound familiar? He further argues that anyone who thinks otherwise is hopelessly naive:

If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice. Enough of this.

In the Republic, Socrates argues, unconvincingly in my book, that a truly virtuous person would not be tempted. I'm with Glaucon--and Tolkien--on this one.

But there are definitely times when a little gizmo like that could come in handy.

CLUTTER AND MORE. Here's the latest edition of my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. For some reason, this one reminds me of William Blake's poem London.

HEALTH CARE REFORM, if it's going to get things done, needs a public insurance component, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Goat Rope concurs.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Here's more on the ruling class hissy fit over the Employee Free Choice Act.

FOOD FIGHT. Here's Michael Pollan again on the movement for local and sustainable food.

A TORTURED CONVERSATION is well summarized here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Maps and territories

Medieval map of the world. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

One way that people can get in big trouble is by falling in love with their theories (or believing their own propaganda). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to this as Platonizing or Platonicity.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Ideas or Forms were more real than the world of the senses. Most people wouldn't go that far these days, but there is a persistent tendency for people to take their model of the world for the world itself.

It's an all too human thing to construct working models of how the world works. In fact, most of the time, these models may work pretty well. But the tricky thing about our world is that it is under no obligation to act in a way that meets our expectations.

As the Polish-American scientist Alfred Korzybski famously put it, "the map is not the territory." The Gentle Reader may have discovered this for him- or herself while attempting to drive to a new destination with a map downloaded from the internet.

As Taleb puts it, Platonicity

is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms," whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures...

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do...Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficult is that a) you do not know before hand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

Some healthy skepticism is called for, even about our most cherished ideas.

OH GOOD. Wall Street securities firms still have plenty on hand for executive bonuses.

SHOP TILL WE DROP? That may have just happened, according to the latest reports on consumer spending.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's economist Dean Baker's take on the data.

THE BIOLOGY OF HATE. Scientists may have identified the brain's "hate circuit." Meanwhile, lots of people seem to have already found it.

URGENT ANCIENT PHOENICIAN UPDATE here. Short version: they got around.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The afterlife of an epic

Plato (left) and Aristotle in a detail from Raphael's The School of Athens. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

This is the very last week here of a long running series on the Odyssey of Homer and what it has to say to us today. You'll also find links and comments about (some) current events. If you like the classics, check the blog archives. The series started August 4 and has run on weekdays since then, hitting most of the stops of Odysseus on his 10 year journey home.

Given the popularity of this story over the ages, it's no surprise that people would have a hard time leaving it alone. The figure of Odysseus keeps showing up in works of literature over the ages.

One place where he showed up in classical Greece was in Plato's Republic. This is a little ironic since Plato didn't have a very high impression of Homer or at least of the moral value of his epics (probably because he didn't get it).

Toward the end of Plato's most famous dialogue comes a discussion of the afterlife commonly known as "the myth of Er." In the story, Er is a soldier who has what we would call a near death experience in which he gets to explore the afterlife and return to tell the tale.

In the afterlife, souls are rewarded or punished for their deeds on earth. For the very wicked, the punishment seems to last forever. Others, after a suitable interval, have a chance to choose their next life. Some humans choose to live as animals and vice versa. Many souls make grave mistakes at this point, choosing what seems to be a pleasant life even though it may lead to further punishment and sufferings.

After all his travels and sufferings, Odysseus has had his fill of adventure and the quest for glory. He chooses a dull life that others rejected. As Plato put it,

There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former tolls had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was delighted to have it.

As we'll see tomorrow, Dante envisioned a whole different scenario for Odysseus...in hell.

WEIGHING IN ON THE MELTDOWN. Here are the views of five economists on where the economic mess is likely to go from, of all places, al Jazeera.

COAL STRUGGLE MAKES CNN. Some coalfield groups and residents are proposing wind energy as an alternative to mountaintop removal mining. The story is going national.

LATIN LIVES. Who said it was a dead language anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Getting in isn't the problem

Nice puppy! William Blake's version of Cerberus, the dog that guards the realm of the dead.

Goat Rope is trailing the journey of Odysseus these days and the next stop is the underworld. If you scroll down, there are also links and comments about current events.

One of the pivotal moments of Homer's Odyssey is the visit its hero paid to the land of the dead. Only a few others in Greek and related myths were able to get there and go back again.

One such was Theseus of Minotaur fame, who went there with a buddy as part of a hare-brained scheme to capture Persephone, wife of Hades, the lord of the dead. That didn't work out so well and he was stuck in a chair there until rescued by Heracles, who visited the land of the dead when stealing Cerberus as part of his 12 labors.

The musician Orpheus visited the underworld after the death of his beloved Eurydice. His musical talents were such that Persephone allowed him to bring her back to the land of the living if he didn't look back on the way out. He did and she didn't. Another mystery cult (see yesterday's post) developed around Orpheus which also promised to provide advantages after death and seemed to include ideas of reincarnation.

Toward the end of his Republic, Plato tells the tall of Er, a soldier who dies and tours the underworld before returning to life. He saw various kinds of rewards and punishments being dispensed as well and learned about the process of reincarnation

In the Roman epic the Aeneid of Virgil, the hero Aeneas has to visit the underworld to consult the shade of his father and learn about the destiny of Rome which he is fated to found. As with Plato, souls destined for rebirth on earth had first to drink from the river of Lethe or forgetfulness so they wouldn't remember their previous lives.

Early Christian converts from paganism were fascinated with what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection and developed charming traditions about "the harrowing of hell," in which the victorious Christ liberated the souls of Adam, Eve and other figures from the Hebrew Bible before rising on Sunday morning. According to 1 Peter 4:6,

For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.

One line from the Apostle's Creed states of him that "he descended into hell," which helped to inspire speculation. The harrowing of hell was the subject of some apocryphal gospels.

Last but not least, the Italian poet Dante's Divine Comedy tells of that poets tour through Hell, Heaven and Purgatory (check Goat Rope archives for an earlier series on that).

The consensus of the ages seems to be that getting there isn't the problem for most folks--getting out again is.

ON A RELATED NOTE, a report from the World Health Organization calls social justice a matter of life and death.

WORST DAY ON WALL STREET since 2001. Let's hope tomorrow's headlines don't say 1929. Thought for the day: isn't it a good thing we didn't let President Bush privatize Social Security?

THE RIPPLE EFFECT. From the Sept. 22 print edition of Business Week:

Losing a job isn't just a career setback, it can be a permanent blow to the community, a recent study finds. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked 4,000 high school graduates over 45 years, researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan studied the community involvement of workers aged 35 to 53. Their finding: After being laid off, employees were 35% less likely than before to participate in community or church groups, charitable organizations--even bowling teams. And few returned once they got new jobs. Instead, they focused their energies on professional and political groups--in the belief, hypothesizes UCLA sociology professor Jennie Brand, that both could have an impact on finding and keeping work

.

HOLY KARMA, BATMAN! After years of lobbying--to the tune of $40 million--for tougher bankruptcy laws, lenders are now starting to feel the pain of getting what they asked for. My heart breaketh...

THIS CAN'T BE TRUE because it would be inconvenient for the coal industry. QED.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DID THEY BELIEVE IT?

Raphael's School of Athens, courtesy of wikipedia.

(Note for first time visitors: The theme here lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.)

The American writer H.L. Mencken defined puritanism as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Puritanism as a turn of mind has been around a lot longer than the dissenters from the Church of England in the 1600s.

It was a major factor in some schools of Greek philosophy, especially that of Socrates and Plato (judging by what we know of the former from the latter). Along with some other killjoys, these people criticized Homer and other poets and purveyors of Greek myth and tragedy for teaching immorality by portraying the gods as behaving badly.

They just didn't get it. As noted previously, several of these gods were at least in part personifications of natural forces: storms, the sea, wild animals, sexual desire, earthquakes, etc. And nature is not known for being moralistic. For that matter, the whole point of many myths is that humans should not try to overreach or act like gods lest they bring about their own destruction.

Socrates liked to torment lovers of myths and poetry by asking them logic-chopping questions and dismissing them if they had trouble answering...as if the whole point of art, song and story was not to speak to the conscious and unconscious and rational and irrational parts of the human psyche. And as if it was all taken literally.

Plato went farther than his teacher. In the Republic, he wanted to ban poets and only teach edifying state-approved stories to its citizens, something that has been the dream of tyrants through the ages.

Goat Rope verdict: there is arguably more enduring and useful wisdom in the Greek tragedies than the whole of Plato's corpus. Get over it, dudes, or drink the hemlock.

For many Greeks, however, there was little room for doubt. To experience awe over storms or fear over breaking oaths and mistreating hosts or guests was to experience Zeus. To experience desire was to experience Aphrodite. To cultivate the land was to honor Demeter and receive her gifts. To drink wine was to experience Dionysus. And so on.

Some of the other gods were derived from and represented human experiences, such as marriage, sickness and healing, exchanges, music and poetry, metal-working etc.

Athena, the main divine character of the Odyssey, is a special case. In that story (and to a lesser extent in the Iliad), she is experienced either openly or, more often, in disguise. Directly or indirectly, she is who/what restrains people from taking rash actions and who/what brings hope, stength and wisdom to people who were tired, forlorn or hopeless. Next time you get a boost when you need it, consider that an Athena moment.

All these examples are derived just from daily life, not counting sacred festivals or holidays. All religions make sense from the inside, and Greek religion was no exception.

ILLUSIONS OF WAR. Here's Krugman on what the war in Georgia might mean.

WAL-MART: EVERYDAY WORKER INTIMIDATION. Labor groups are urging the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the retail giant broke any laws by telling employees the world would come to an end if they voted the wrong way.

HOME FORECLOSURES are up 55 percent from this time last year.

BAD BALLOON. Meanwhile, inflation is at its highest rate in 17 years.

VERY COOL HOT IDEA. Researchers think they've found a way to turn roads and parking lots into solar energy collectors.

IT'S OFFICIAL. Joggers live longer than people who don't exercise (most of the time).

IS THAT A BIGFOOT IN YOUR FREEZER or are you just happy to be here? Two searchers in Georgia claim to have found a dead one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THINKING ABOUT MATH

Caption: Seamus McGoogle contemplates the square root of -1.

El Cabrero has been brooding this week about the nature of science and knowledge. Must be the weather.

One aspect of human knowledge that I find fascinating is math. I like thinking about math--much more than actually doing it, anyway.

For several years I taught GED classes in Head Start centers in southern WV. Ordinarily, one might think people do a better job of teaching things they're better at (pardon the ending of a phrase with a preposition), but that wasn't the case with me.

I've done a lot of writing over the years, a good bit of it for publication, but I was a total flop at trying to teach it. It always seemed like there were an infinite number of ways to write just about anything.

Math was different. I was horrible at it but at least there were rules.

Sometimes, just to mess with (my own and) the students' minds, I'd ask them why math seemed to work--was it just the way our minds were wired or was it something "out there"? Was it discovered or made up?

As a pragmatist, I'm not sure it matters, but the question is an interesting and old one. For the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (of eponymous theorem fame), math was the key to the secrets of the universe. He was a pioneer in geometry who claimed to be able to hear the music of the heavenly spheres. He also discovered the mathematical relationship between notes on a musical scale.

Plato was an admirer both of Pythagoras and math. He believed our mathematical ideas were an innate knowledge of the eternal forms. The following words were said to have been written above the doors to his Academy: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."

That would be one more club I'd never be able to join.

A DAY LATE AND... This really should have been in yesterday's post, but July 24 was the day when the federal minimum wage went up for the first time in over 10 years. That was a good fight. The next one will be to make sure we don't wait 10 more years before it happens again. Here's a good op-ed on the subject by Holly Sklar.

IS THAT A PYTHON IN YOUR EVERGLADE OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY... From the NY Times, it looks like released Burmese pythons are having a good time in Florida these days.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. The title of this op-ed says it all: If This Is Such a Rich Country, Why Are We Getting Squeezed?. It's a good analysis of growing inequality and what we can do about it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GODS AND EARTH GIANTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a keen student of the science of hummingbirds.

It's interesting that some of the current debates on the nature of science and knowledge have ancient roots.

Consider the following questions: does science give objective knowledge about the world that is certain, universal and necessary? Or are all it's results provisional and tentative?

Other ways of putting it might consist of asking whether "laws" of science are discovered or made up? Is it about what is true or what seems to work best to account for experience?

This one goes all the way back to Plato, and probably farther. Plato, inspired by his teacher Socrates, believed that universal knowledge of truth was possible beyond the realm of senses or opinion. His main enemies were the sophists, traveling teachers of reasoning and rhetoric, who tended to be relativistic and pragmatic.

One such was Protagoras, who said "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Plato was not amused.

In his dialogue The Sophist, Plato, through the character of the Stranger, describes this controversy as a war between gods and giants:

There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence...

Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body...

And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

Plato, of course, thought he was on the side of the gods. It looks like the earth giants have won a few lately though.

SPEAKING OF GIANTS, congratulations to Jean Edward Smith, professor of history at El Cabrero's alma mater, Marshall University. Smith has won kudos for his recent biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt--peace be unto him. The title is FDR and the publisher is Random House. It has gained many positive reviews around the country.

Dr. Smith was quoted in the Marshall Magazine as saying "Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt stand head and shoulders about the 40 other men who (have) occupied the White House. Washington founded the country, Lincoln preserved it and Roosevelt revived it." Amen.

In El Cabrero's childhood home, it was less risky to make irreverent religious jokes than to dis the Roosevelts. It is now safer for my (legally) adult kids to do the same in my presence.

SPEAKING OF MARSHALL, the same issue of the magazine has an interesting article about how public investments in research at Marshall is starting to (literally) pay dividends. This is yet another example if any is needed of the vital role that public investments in education, research and infrastructure can lead to a high road approach to economic development--in contrast to the low roaders who want to cut these investment, eliminate the minimum wage, and eliminate regulations that protect workers from injury and death on the job.

NATTERING NABOBS OF NEGATIVISM. On a similar note, here's an op-ed by yours truly from yesterday's Gazette about the good things that are happening in WV that can get and keep us on the high road.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WAR WITHIN, plus the privatization of war and global inequality

Caption: Seamus McGoogle's main psychological conflict is due to his inability to break the window and get to the bird feeder.

This is the second installment of Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud Week. This means that in addition to snarky commentary and links on social justice issues, each day will highlight one aspect of ol' Sig's thoughts that are still interesting today.

(Disclaimer: El Cabrero is not a psychologist and is also fully aware that a lot of what Freud talked about not only would not hold up to scientific investigation but is on the order of science fiction. Good though.)

One idea of Freud's that I think is a keeper is the vision of people not as totally rational animals nor yet as robots conditioned by stimulus and response but rather as inherently conflicted critters.

We are divided and the different parts of ourselves do not always or even usually play nicely with each other. Much of human life consists of trying to reconcile drives and demands that aren't all that reconcilable.

He believed that not only is the human mind partly conscious and partly unconscious but that it it also divided between the id or "it" that wants what it wants when it wants it (usually RIGHT NOW!), the superego or "over-I" of internalized social norms whose job is to tell the id it can't have what it wants, and the ego or "I" that has to deal with the demands of the external world and try to mediate the demands of the other two warring factions.

Actually, this idea is way older than Freud. Plato in the fourth century BC used the analogy of the rational soul as a charioteer trying to control two very different horses, one of which is "is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control" while the other is "companion to wild boasts and indecency...shaggy around the ears--deaf as a post--and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined." Elsewhere Plato talks about the soul as having three parts, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive.

St. Paul also spoke eloquently of the war within. In the Epistle to the Romans, he says

The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do...I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. (7:19, 23)

and in Galatians

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. (5:17)

For Freud, the war within goes on pretty much all the time, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. It makes human life not only tragic but interesting.

THE WAR WITHOUT. In Joseph Heller's classic Catch-22, the hyper-capitalist Milo Minderbinder says "Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry." What was once a laugh line is becoming a reality. In the April 2 issue of The Nation, Jeremy Scahill has an interesting feature on the privatization of war titled "Bush's Shadow Army."

GLOBAL INEQUALITY. A brief item in the Spring issue of Yes Magazine highlights the wealth gap on a world scale:

A new global study of personal wealth shows that the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of global household wealth. The study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, Helsinki was based on data from the year 2000. It showed that the richest 1 percent of adults (those worth at least $500,000) controlled 40 percent of global assets, and that the richest 10 percent of adults (those worth at least $61,000) owned 85 percent of the world total. Meanwhile the bottom half (those worth less than $2,200) together owned barely 1 percent of global wealth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED