Bioethics

Everybody wants to go to heaven,

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But none of us want to go now.

A mean conservative Newt Gingrich argues: “we need a new federal resolve to truly defeat Alzheimer’s. As America’s largest generation ages, we have no time to lose.” On the empathic left Ezekial Emanuel (brother of the gentle soul, Emanual): “Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

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Minor Notes – Art, Purpose & Evolution

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I added a comment on Brian Boyd on the post below; just before going to bed, I took one last look at the net and see that Denis Dutton (A&L Daily) has linked to a new article by Boyd. Since I don’t really have the background and right now also don’t have the time to do either justice, this is just a link:

A) Boyd’s article: “The Purpose-Driven Life” is in The American Scholar and argues: “Evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity.”

B) Speaking of art & evolution, I haven’t linked yet to Dutton’s book itself: The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Evolution. Dutton enriches all of our lives with A&L Daily. The Amazon entry includes a lengthy and somewhat critical review by that witty youngster, Jonah Lehrer. I feel immense gratitude to Dutton – I think he dermonstrates on a daily basis the usefulness of the internet and a genial wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. I suspect his work is richer than Lehrer implies, but must admit this has been an over-committed year and we’ve been moving his book around from table to table in the livinig room. If no one else here gets around to talking about it, I promise a discussion in a few months (but not sooner).

By the way, does anyone out there belong to the Czech organization, SVU?

Who We Are

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We aren’t always – perhaps seldom – the best we can be. Fortunately, we have our moments. And, well, generally, we aren’t racists, bigots, sexists; we aren’t roaring masses lynching, beheading, stoning. We feel jealousy but aren’t driven by ravenous coveting; we can be irrational but save such excesses for football.

Obama has demonstrated in the last couple of weeks who he thinks we are. But he doesn’t know us.

“But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”
 
“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” (Politico)

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The Gut: Tribalism’s Home and Not Always a Bad Thing

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Thanks, Shannon for your blogging, which has  provided a  smorgasbord.  

 

In the comments to his “Identity-Politics Insanity” post, Helen’s observation reminds us of a truth about American politics but more importantly about human nature.   For instance, a balanced ticket is attractive, because we assume more ideas are in play and more people feel an identity with their leaders.   On the other hand, Shannon is right:    identity politics encourages a tribalism whose restraint has been the great triumph of western civilization and a prerequisite for a diverse nation ruled by predictable, equitable laws.   We rightly fear identities that trump law & duty, but we also fear ideologies which encourage children to betray their parents and wives their husbands.   We ignore such passions natural to our species at our own peril: unacknowledged they threaten chaos; diminished, we lack a glue that holds communities and even identities together.

 

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Faulkner’s Grip on Psychology

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“The old fierce pull of blood.” – Faulkner

Literature helps us understand human nature. Disciplines designed to do so are not always so good at it. Sometimes, indeed, they seem counterproductive. “Buried Prejudice”, an article by Siri Carpenter in Scientific American Mind (via A&L), argues that “[e]ven our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races.” But to Carpenter (and the researchers summarized) the tension between our understanding of truth and justice (transcendent ideals that also pulled Faulkner’s young hero, Sarty) and our feel of the tribal (which he feels mixed with “despair” and “grief”) is not the tension between feeling and thinking, the biological and the rational. Our culture has slowly developed institutions to restrain the tribal passions central to our earlier survival but detrimental to a more diverse and larger society. But, Carpenter describes a group of researchers who have found (“[u]sing a variety of sophisticated methods,” that we “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” (The word “astounding” is telling.) Of course, this is not always helpful – say, in sitting on a jury – when we link (as Jesse Jackson implies he did in the catchy intro) “black” with “danger”.

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