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.

Weekend sendoff, including good news, evil clowns and bees

Here's a potpourri to finish up the work week.

First, did you know that creepy clown threats are a thing now? I was not aware of that. It turns out that even Kanawha County schools in WV have beefed up security because of it.

(I attribute a lot of this to the evil clown in Stephen King's It book and movie. It was, groan, disarming.)

On the bright side, Medicaid expansion is working well in Louisiana, where over 305,000 people have gained coverage in the last few months. Families USA also reports that:

*Nearly 12,000 of these newly enrolled adults have already started receiving screening and treatment for chronic conditions and illnesses including breast cancer, colon cancer, and diabetes.

*More than 1,000 women have received mammograms or other diagnostic breast imaging and 24 of these women are currently being treated for breast cancer. 

*Nearly 700 adults have received colonoscopies and more than 100 had polyps, an early sign of colon cancer, removed during the procedure. 

*160 adults have been newly diagnosed with diabetes and have started receiving necessary care to help them manage their condition. 

You can find more from them on the benefits of Medicaid expansion here.

Finally, here's an interesting look at what might be the emotional life of bees. Who knew?

Stoned and unequal

Yesterday I happened to attend a meeting of WV county officials and had a great conversation with a prosecutor from the southern coalfields who spoke of the awful epidemic of prescription drug abuse in that part of the state. Low income people and low income communities are the hardest hit.

Those familiar with WV will recall that these southern counties are both the ones from which huge amounts of coal have been taken and are also those with high rates of poverty and unemployment, big inequalities in terms of power, and not a whole lot in the way of empowerment for most people.

By chance, this morning I read the following passage about an experiment with monkeys in the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett:

In a clever experiment, researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina took twenty macaque monkeys and housed them for a while in individual cages They next housed the animals in groups of four and observed the social hierarchies which developed in each group, noting which animals were dominant and which were subordinate. They scanned the monkey's brains before and after they were put into groups. Next, they taught the monkeys that they could administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever-they could take as much or as little as they liked.

The results of this experiment were remarkable. Monkeys that had become dominant had more dopamine activity in their brains than they had exhibited before becoming dominant, while monkeys that became subordinate when housed in groups showed no changes in their brain chemistry. The dominant monkeys took much less cocaine than the subordinate monkeys. In effect, the subordinate monkeys were medicating themselves against the impact of their low social status. 

Golly, it's a good that that never happens with people, huh?

ECONOMIC JUSTICE 101. Here's a take on the subject by yours truly.

ZOMBIE BEES? A friend of mine from upstate New York just sent me this link. Thanks, CR! The good news is that at least zombie bees don't eat other bees and turn the ones they bite into other zombies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Don't bee a stranger

When I was a small child, our family lived next to the kind of people who probably don't exist anymore. They were an elderly couple, the Richmonds, and they were what I can only describe as bedrock Appalachians, real mountain people. They knew all the old ways and skills of survival.

The man, Hinton, knew where to find fish in the river. He hunted for ginseng in the hills. And he claimed--and I believed--that he could follow honeybees to their hives. Hinton attempted to educate me about the benefits of honeybees. I was a hard sell since these creatures seemed to have been designed specifically to sting my feet when I played barefoot outside.

It took me a while to get the memo, but eventually I became a bee fan. I was sad to learn of the recent unprecedented decline in the bee population due to a mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. This was bad news not just for bee-keepers but for the many plants and crops that the bees pollinate.

Eventually, this hit home. For the past two summers, I don't recall seeing a single honey bee at Goat Rope Farm. I am pleased to announce that they are back and were as welcome to me as the return of a long lost friend. I hope they stick around.

TALKING SENSE. Here is Paul Krugman doing battle with bad economic ideas.

FAUX NEWS. Here's a look at 14 propaganda techniques used by a certain "fair and balanced" news network.

FROM EVIL TO HEROISM. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist of prison experiment fame, is trying to see whether heroism can be taught. (Search Goat Rope archives in upper left hand corner for several posts on Zimbardo's work.)

A SENSE OF FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE may be innate in humans. Too bad some people apparently didn't get the memo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Short rations again

No time to ramble today, but here are a few items that caught my eye:

FAMILIES CHALLENGE MASSEY SALE. A lawsuit is in the works challenging the sale of Massey Energy to Alpha Natural Resources in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster and the facts that have emerged since it occurred in April 2010.

"RIGHT WING SOCIAL ENGINEERING." Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to gut Medicare continues to generate political blowback. More on that here.

SPEAKING OF POLITICS, bees have an interesting system.

WHEN SPIDERS ATTACK,they do it really well.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Waiting for Mr. Good Bee

No honey there.

I used to ponder such deep questions as how long it would take a typical American to notice it if birds disappeared. This year I've really started to notice the disappearance of honey bees. I saw exactly zero at Goat Rope Farm this summer.

When I was a little kid I hated honey bees for their tendency to sting me when I accidentally stepped on them barefoot. It didn't take too long to outgrow that childhood prejudice once I learned about how useful, interesting and generally easy to get along with they were.

Honey bees have been called "angels of agriculture" for their role in pollination. Although they have seemed like a natural part of the landscape for centuries, they are not native to North America but were brought here by European settlers in the 17th century. In their absence in the wake of the bee colony collapse of the last few years, I've noticed what seem to be a lot more bumble bees.

This could be a coincidence, but I also noticed a lot more bald faced hornet's nests this year. From what I understand, they mostly eat other insects but I have read that they do some minor pollination in late summer. Given the choice, I think I'd prefer honey bees. I will watch anxiously for their return the same way I do for the return of minnows in our creek after a dry spell.

GETTING HICKY WITH IT. A television ad for Republican Senate candidate John Raese stirred up quite a bit of controversy yesterday after a casting call was released which said that actors should go for the "hicky" look.

A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN. Several serious safety violations were found at a Massey mine in Boone County.

GO UNION. A new study suggests that labor unions improve the quality of life for members and non members.

CAN I HAVE ONE? According to the NY Times,

The earliest known relatives of dinosaurs were the size of a house cat, walked on four legs and left footprints in the quarries in Poland.

They sound really cute.

SINCE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, here's an item about some desert lizards with mammal-like social behavior.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sweet revenge

We hit a seasonal milestone at Goat Rope Farm this week with the first lighting of the wood stove. As hot as this summer and fall have been, it didn't seem like that day would come.

This year, I am deriving particular gratification from throwing wood in the fire. Usually, our woodpile is collected here and there on a casual basis, but last year it got personal when some trees of ours fell on a neighbor's yard.

I have engaged in single combat with those suckers since the Christmas holidays, chainsawing, hand sawing, lifting, loading, splitting and generally making little ones out of big ones. Those trees had some really knotty parts and were hell to split. I'm pretty sure that I expended more energy on the chopping some of them than they will yield in the burning.

It is probably not an admirable personal trait to hold grudges against no-longer-animate objects, but I derive satisfaction from singling out the toughest pieces and tossing them in the stove with a farewell greeting along the order of "I've got you now, you ___________."

AIN'T WE GOT FUN. The Rev. Jim Lewis goes Gatsby in his latest edition of Notes from Under the Fig Tree. (As I mentioned before, we have a few fig trees here and it would be hard for a cat to get under them--I don't see how he does it.)

GETTING ATTENTION. The weird race to fill the late Senator Byrd's seat caught the attention of the New York Times.

UNSAFE. This Washington Post article from earlier this week looks at mine safety--or the lack of it.

WORKING ON A MYSTERY. New clues have emerged in the great honeybee die-off.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Anyone for a goat song?

El Cabrero has gone for a pretty long time at this blog without a big jag on Greek mythology. I think it's been since last autumn.

Having said that, I feel my self control starting to wane. Maybe it's because I've recently resolved to read or re-read all existing Greek tragedies. Some of them I revisit fairly regularly, like Sophocles' Oedipus plays or the Orestia of Aeschylus. But there are a bunch that I've either missed altogether or haven't looked at in a long time.

My first stop was Euripides' Bacchae, which I always thought would make a good movie or at least an extended old-school Twilight Zone episode. It's about the less-than-friendly welcome the god Dionysus received on visiting his mother's home town of Thebes. Take home message: if a god comes, roll out the red carpet--or else.

But first, here's a little cheery nugget from my old pal Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. One of his main ideas in the book is that the ancient Greeks had a deep pessimistic streak but managed to say yes to life in spite of it, thanks in part to the help of art. Here goes:

"There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: 'Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. Bet the second best for you is--to die soon."

Gee, I feel better already.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. The Obama administration indicated it wants to reverse some Bush-era policies but it's not clear what that means.

ANTS AND SUCH. We know they're social animals, but what about the individuals?

ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

ABANDONED PETS are on the rise in the wake of foreclosures and a tanking economy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Heirlooms

As noted in yesterday's post, traditional Buddhist teachings regard being born as a human as a rare and precious opportunity. Believe it or not, we could do way worse. Even more rare and precious is being born a human in a time and place where one can become aware of the Buddha's teaching or the Dharma.

By those standards at least, El Cabrero is pretty lucky. Although I was raised in and remain attached to the Episcopal Church, there was never a time in my life when I can remember not knowing who the Buddha was or at least what he looked like (according to traditional iconography anyhow).

My paternal grandfather spent many years in China, where my father and uncle were born. He wasn't a missionary, although he did become a priest when he returned. Though he died several years before I was born, the artifacts of his travels decorated the old family farm. Among these was a bronze statue of the Buddha and a prayer wheel. When my grandmother died, those were the only things I asked for.

When I was a child, while everyone at the old home place adhered to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the Buddha was always spoken of with deep respect, as were other elements of Chinese culture. I wound up being drawn to and equally comfortable with each. They are not identical, but I've found them to be complimentary and the tension between them to be interesting.

A wise old priest once told me that creative tensions were what made things like Gothic cathedrals work and that Christianity itself was the product of creative tensions between the Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions.

THE (GLOBAL) PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. A worldwide study of the subjective sense of well-being finds that it tends to be higher in places with less poverty, better health care and access to education. Who would have guessed?

A VERY UNMERRY BIRTHDAY. NAFTA turned 15 on Jan. 1. Ordinary folks on either side of the US-Mexico border weren't big winners.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. From the Wall Street Journal, here is a brief description of some rare but interesting neurological disorders.

THESE ARE YOUR BEES on drugs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IF NOT A GOD, THEN WHAT?

Mammon from Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme lately at Goat Rope is the economy and how we think about it. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Short summary: the way we think about things matters because it can effect our actions. We often speak of "The Economy" as if it was an independent being endowed with a will of its own--and sometimes it seems that way.

In recent years, we've even witnessed the rise of a new religion, the cult of the market god--and market fundamentalists aren't a whole lot better than any other type of fanatic.

It is the view of El Cabrero that a healthy way to think about it was suggested long ago by a certain Jesus, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two. When he was busted for violating Sabbath regulations, he responded by saying "The Sabbath was made for people and not people for the Sabbath." Just substitute "economy" for "Sabbath."

TURNING UP THE HEAT. A Senate panel blasted the Bush administration for exaggerations and misstatements leading up to the unnecessary war in Iraq.

OH GOOD. Some folks think the Bush administration is gearing up to attack Iran.

BOOTY SHAKING, BEE STYLE. Bees from different parts of the world understand each other's rear-end wiggling. I just thought you should know.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Here's a critique of apocalyptic religion.

OH MY PROPHETIC KNEE! There's scientific evidence that people with aching joints really can predict storms.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD COMPANY

Nazi troops rally at Nuremberg, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabero has been musing lately about the ideas of the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries. The series started Monday.

Of all the possible criticisms that can be directed at Jung--and there are a boatload--the most serious involve his alleged early sympathy for the Nazi movement. Controversy continues about this up to the present.

Politically, Jung was not the brightest crayon in the box. He was a conservative Swiss with considerable wealth, thanks to his marriage to the former Emma Rauschenbach, an heiress. He was hostile to leftist movements and ideas. Like many wealthy Germans of his day, he may have been sympathetic or at least ambivalent about the early Nazi movement. It was all for law and order, after all...

Psychoanalysis in its early days had a disproportionate number of Jewish adherents, which is why Freud valued their alliance before they broke off contact. After the break with Freud, Jung dabbled in what Sig considered to be the black swamp of occultism. Among the many currents of the latter were efforts to promote so-called "Aryan" spirituality, much of which was eventually embraced by the Nazis.

In some of his speculations, he seemed to imply that various "racial" groups had their own psychological makeup. He wrote some rather loopy things on happenings in Germany, such as his essay "Wotan," which seems to argue that the German people were under the possession of the archetype of the god of the same name from Teutonic mythology. Here's an essay which discusses Jung's tendency toward "proto-fascist thinking."

Jung also retained positions of leadership in the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and the journal Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie after these had fallen under Nazi influence. He later claimed that he did so in order to protect Jewish analysts and to keep the discipline of psychotherapy from being wiped out by the Nazis, who suspected its "Jewish" origins. These claims have been widely disputed.

There is an ironic twist to the story. After the US entered World War II, Jung was contacted by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner to the CIA. He was eventually dubbed "Agent 488" and provided opinions on psychological conditions in Nazi Germany.

Jung disputed allegations of Nazi sympathies in the postwar period, but permanent damage was done to his reputation.

At the very least, someone who wasn't able to spot the fact that Nazis were bad news early on does not deserve the status of oracle and font of wisdom.

ALL THAT GLITTERS ISN'T GOLD. This article discusses the first Gilded Age and the the one we're currently living through.

HUNGER. From the UK Independent, here's more on the growing global food crisis.

ONLY CONNECT. The US ranks 15th out of 30 developed countries in providing access to high speed Internet, as this EPI snapshot reports.

BINGO! I couldn't resist linking this article about how bingo suffers when smoking is banned. In El Cabrero's days as a volunteer firefighter, the most hazardous duty I ever did was working our bingo games. The smoke was so thick an air pack would have helped. Once when it was over I counted the non filtered cigarettes in one player's ashtray. I can't remember the exact number now but I think it was around 15 and the game lasted around three hours.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A BEE TODAY? Here's an item in praise of them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OF HUMAN BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

Welcome to the final day of Spinoza Week at Goat Rope. Aside from links and comments about current events, the guiding thread this week has been the thought of that great and humane 17th century philosopher. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

There seems to be a paradox at the center of Spinoza's thought. First, he makes a strong case for determinism, the idea that there is no freedom of the will and that everything happens of necessity--indeed, from the necessity of the nature of God. On the other hand, he believes that through proper understanding and awareness, we can free ourselves from the grip of negative emotions and misguided ideas.

It seems to El Cabrero that if everything happens of necessity, there would be no way of overcoming negative emotions and bad thinking and, conversely, if we could do that, then maybe everything isn't determined. But I like Spinoza too much to push the point.

At the opening of Part IV of The Ethics, he writes

Human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions does not have power over himself, but is in the hands of fortune to such an extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse.

It's hard to argue with that. But Spinoza was no Spock who thought all emotions were bad. He believed all beings have a drive to persist in being and increase their power. He called that conatus. Things that increase our potential and strengthen us are good and give us pleasure (rightly understood) and things that weaken us or harm us cause pain. By pleasure, he seemed to mean something more like self actualization or the eudaimonia of the Greeks.

The problem is false reasoning, obsessions, and negative emotions--meaning emotions that have a negative affect on us and other. He called this "inadequate thinking." To the extent we are captive to these, we are really passive and helpless in their grasp.

He believed that by thinking clearly and distinctly about how the world and our minds work, we could gain power over these negative patterns and live a life of reason. That means enjoying in moderation the good things of the world, doing what we can to improve things, and accepting those things we can't change. People living the life of reason want nothing for themselves that they don't wish everyone to have and look after both their own interests and the well-being of society.

This isn't altogether different from the Buddhist idea of overcoming negative attachments and delusional thinking through right understanding and mindfulness or the modern psychological approach of cognitive therapy that helps people learn about and correct irrational ideas.

To the extent we do that, we begin to look at live sub specie aeternitas or from the viewpoint of eternity. The highest level of serenity was something he called "the intellectual love of God," which means reverence for the universe and acceptance of the nature of things. He even seems to suggest that to the extent we do this, our minds approach a kind of immortality, although he probably didn't have a heavenly Disney World in mind.

Of course, it's easier said than done but we can make progress in that direction. Here are the last words of The Ethics:

...it is clear of how much a wise man is capable and how stronger he is than an ignorant one, who is guided by lust alone. For an ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes, never possessing true contentment of mind also lives as it were unaware of himself, God, and things, and as soon as he ceases to be passive, ceases to be. On the other hand, the wise man, in so far as he is considered as such, is scarcely moved in spirit: he is aware of himself, of God, and things by a certain eternal necessity, he never ceases to be, but always possesses true contentment of mind. If the road I have shown to lead to this is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be hard when it is so seldom found. For how it could it be that if salvation were close at hand and could be found without difficulty it should be neglected by almost all? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.

I don't know about y'all, but I've got a long way to go.

SAD NEWS from Illinois.

WHAT WE DIDN'T GET. Here's an item on the kind of economic stimulus we really need.

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR. Sometimes the violence doesn't stop when veterans return.

RITTER ON IRAN. Here's an interview with Scott Ritter about the Bush administration's intentions towards Iran.

ATTACKS ON HOMELESS PEOPLE are rising.

THE ONE AND THE MANY. Is a beehive one big organism or a bunch of little ones?


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED