Louis Aggasiz & The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

From “The White Man’s Burden,” by Rudyard Kipling

A few daze ago, I mentioned the former “scientific consensus” around the relative development of the so-called human “races,” placing members of the “White” race on top. At the time this belief was forming and being promulgated, the latter half of the nineteenth century, White men had more or less finished conquering the world, and were naturally looking for justification they needed for the various crimes they had committed in doing so.

And crimes they had committed. The British, for example, fought two wars with the Chinese in order to secure the right to distribute opium in China, and they cruelly put down the so-called Indian Mutiny. Americans were struggling with the role slavery played in the development of the United States, and they were engaged in a decades-long war of extermination against Native Americans. In 1899, Kipling wrote the poem excerpted above to encourage Americans in brutal war they were prosecuting against Filipino guerrillas fighting for their independence. Every major power on the European continent occupied colonies, enslaving the indigenous people and making away with the natural riches in the lands they conquered. Millions of words have been written on the subject, but let us just say that, consciously and unconsciously, Whites looked for a way to frame their greed and killing as other than what it was.

They therefore construed their otherwise inexcusable behavior as a campaign to “civilize” the inferior “colored races.” In order for such a construct to fly, there had to be a way to prove that what they were bringing in the form of “civilization” was indeed higher and better than the cultures they were systematically displacing. Furthermore, they needed to demonstrate to their own satisfaction they they themselves were higher and better than the people they were destroying…er, civilizing.

Enter Louis Aggasiz, the Swiss-American who was perhaps the leading naturalist on this side of the Atlantic. Science as we know it was relatively new in the middle of the nineteenth century, and men of science–they were all men, of course–could achieve a celebrity status that is hard to fathom from our perspective. Aggasiz, who practically invented the study of glaciation and was the foremost ichthyologist of his day, was the chief naturalist at Harvard, and among the most famous, celebrated men in the United States. He was perhaps the most beloved member of a circle that included, among others, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,, and Charles Sumner, America’s leading abolitionist,among  the brightest lights in the growing nation’s intellectual firmament. Although the political spectrum had a different shape in the 1850s, these  forward-looking, open-minded men might code as “progressive” or “liberal” in today’s terms.

Nevertheless, because his ideas confirmed the role of the While man as conservator and custodian of the Black man, Aggasiz’s lectures on race were popular with slaveholders. Agassiz, who opposed Darwin’s theories, believed that the different races of men were placed on earth separately by God. Through an intellectual move, called “polygenism,” that seems absurd to us, Whites were designated as unrelated to members of the “colored races,”and naturally superior to them. Although the association of Aggasiz with these beliefs has, in more recent times, precipitated the removal of his name from many places and things, it was put there originally because of the great esteem in which he was once held.

The scientific racism typified by Aggasiz’s ideas would resonate for generations. Had a vote been taken among anthropologists and geneticists in, say, 1930 on whether Whites are superior to Blacks, there can be little doubt that the outcome would have been overwhelmingly in favor of White superiority. Although attitudes turned away, after World War II,  from constructs associated with the Nazis, had the same vote been taken in 1950, the majority would probably still have favored White superiority. They would also have been clear in endorsing the intellectual superiority of men over women. Remember, with exactly enough exceptions to prove the rule, all scientists were White men.

Fortunately, neither science nor the truth science seeks is, in the final analysis, subject to a vote. Sadly, when it comes to debate on current issues, such as climate change, this undeniable proposition has become a talking point of the Right. Sometimes, leading scientists, to great acclaim, present ideas that become objects of ridicule, and worse, when measured against the standards of  a later time. Into this category had already fallen, by the time it became the premise of a major motion picture, the projection that the Greenhouse Effect would produce disastrous changes in the course and intensity of the Gulf Stream. Kooky generalizations, based firmly in science, often become the currency of political discourse and popular belief, as was true of scientific racism’s role in controversies regarding slavery, colonialism, and segregation. Whether a current set of scientific constructs is valid or not, it’s bad for science and it’s bad for politics when the two mix.

The Shooting And Propaganda

Now that I’ve been reminded by a couple of daze of paying attention to the news because of the Giffords shooting how painful it is for me to read or think about the news, this will be my last politics-related post. I wept yesterday when I accidentally tuned in to “Meet the Press” yesterday morning and they were discussing the shooting of Rep. Giffords and others in Tucson, a town in which I have spent considerable time. For as long as I could stand it,  I watched “talking heads” for the first time in a long time.

I saw how the Republicans had chosen to deflect, with reference to the derangement of the shooter, the question of whether their own rhetoric had fueled the shooting. Today, it’s pretty clear they’ve won the propaganda battle over this issue, with the President and others decrying the vitriolic rhetoric on “both sides,” during the current “dark times.” Never mind that the Republicans have been ratcheting up hatred of the President and “liberals” since before the previous presidential election and especially since the so-called “health-care debate.” Never mind that Giffords’s rival in the last election invited his supporters to shoot off assault rifles with him. Never mind the rage and bigotry central to the appeal of the TEA Party. All the Republicans had to do was claim that the Left was cruel to W and that Obama said, “If they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun…” In doing this, they demonstrated the great value of being prepared, of having already established that liberals are mean, too, as well as the total gutlessness of every Democratic politician of note, including the President.

On a personal note, I’m hoping that I can rise above this  “dark time of division,” or whatever it is, and stop thinking about the whole thing. Otherwise, I’ll fucking drive myself crazy.

My Birthday

So far, I’m not handling being 60 very well.

“San Francisco”

Now that football season is drawing to a close, those of us who watch have many times seen a quarterback try to hit a receiver surrounded by the entire defensive backfield. The quarterback, his mind frozen into a single pathway, looks at a bunch of opposition jerseys and throws. Often, the mistake results in an interception.

That brings me to the Congressional Democrats, who demonstrated their death wish by repeatedly throwing into the teeth of Republican propaganda. Nothing demonstrates this frozen mindset more than choosing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. As those who read this blog know, I’ve divorced myself as much as possible from politics, but I use this opportunity to explore, for a moment, the other side of propaganda, the response. Nothing against Pelosi, but by the time she became Speaker, the Republicans had spent years turning her into a laughingstock for their constituents. Perhaps her most important characteristic, in this regard, is that she represents a district in San Francisco. By electing her Speaker, the House Democrats displayed their total cluelessness both of the structure of attitudes in this country, and of the way Republican strategists had prepared to insure that their time out of power would be brief.

Let me tell you about what two words, “San” and “Francisco,” mean to millions of Americans. In late May of 1979, I was driving through Oklahoma. Stopping at  gas station, I walked the shed to pay–this was in the daze before ATM cards were in anyone’s imagination. Inside, was a sort of restaurant in amongst a primitive repair facility. On a shelf above the register was a small TV, black-and-white, of course. Either a live feed or footage from the previous day showed San Francisco’s White Night Riots, mostly involving young gay men, which occurred in response to the lenient sentence handed out to Dan White for shooting the Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the darling of the gay community. Several customers were standing around watching. One of them, a crusty guy who seemed old to me at the time, said this: “San Francisco.” A note of assent went around the room, as if that brief utterance was all one needed to know about the spectacle before us.

It’s not a secret that San Francisco is a red flag to a huge swath of the American public. Nevertheless, the House Democrats decided to thumb their noses at the Republican constituency, placing a huge target on their backs, and giving right-wing propagandists a huge present wrapped in a string of pearls. Out of arrogance, out of a misguided intention to “make history,” beginning a myriad of harebrained, puzzling moves, they elected Nancy Pelosi, from California’s 8th  Congressional District in San Francisco, as Speaker and almost deliberately threw an interception.

Scientific Consensus

I hate when this happens. I start thinking about a controversy, and then all my previous concerns about it come to the fore. That’s what occurred yesterday in connection with my entry on AIDS. Especially because of a comment I received, but also as a natural consequence of revisiting a subject in which I was previously interested, memories of my frustration and irritation regarding the topic flowed back. Today’s entry reflects that process.

Even a cursory reading of some of what is out there on AIDS will lead to the phrase “scientific consensus.” For example, Thabo Mbeki’s notorious rejection of the “scientific consensus” regarding the causal link between aquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has forever stamped him as a bad man, despite his enormous contributions to life in South Africa. “Scientific consensus” is also a term of prominence in discussions of climate change and global warming. It is employed in these contexts as the last word in any debate, and  those who question the “scientific consensus” are frequently labeled as “deniers” or even “denialists.” Rarely, if ever, does anyone ask some simple questions: What is a “scientific consensus”? How does a “scientific consensus” arise? How would it function? I do not mean to address all of these questions in detail, but merely to point out, first of all, that it is legitimate to ask them, and also to suggest that there is hardly a one-to-one relationship between “scientific consensus” and the truth.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn showed that scientific knowledge does not proceed along a smooth curve, nor is it based simply on the accumulation of data. On the contrary, science is a social phenomenon that tends to organize around what Kuhn called “paradigms,” and science is an activity that can be described in sociological terms. Scientific understanding of the cosmos was once organized around a paradigm, attributed to Ptolemy, placing the earth at the center of a set of “orbs.” Eventually, that geocentric paradigm, “scientific consensus,” was replaced, through a series of conjectural steps, Kuhn argued, rather than through more accurate observations, by the heliocentric paradigm associated with Copernicus, which gave way to one that places the earth in a cosmos that has no center, the “scientific consensus” regarding the universe we accept today (with many amendments).

The point I am making here, with reference to Kuhn, is that it is dangerous to give a “scientific consensus” some kind of special status, although it almost always acquires such a status, people being what they are. The Ptolemaic conception, as the model of the universe accepted by the Church, was literally sacrosanct. Galileo and others were severely punished for questioning it. To us, a geocentric conception of the cosmos seems silly, but a few hundred years ago rejecting it could be a matter of life and death. Mbeki is not the first person to be destroyed for questioning the “scientific consensus.” (The self-serving blame AIDS activists heap on Mbeki for hundreds of thousands of deaths, based solely on conjecture but forever a part of the man’s biography, could be a case in point for anyone who wishes to know what chutzpah means.)

Those of us who went to school in the fifties remember being taught that the apparent fit of the coasts of South America and Africa was an amusing coincidence. Alfred Wegener, the chief proponent of “continental drift,” the central feature of plate tectonics theory, could not buy an audience for his theory that the continents look like they fit together basically because they do fit together. His views were regularly attacked by geologists, most prominently by the great paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most respected and revered men in the history of science. Today, Wegener’s views are the foundation of the “scientific consensus” in geology.

Thus, the “scientific consensus” can be dead wrong, sometimes with a moral attached. Practically since the beginning of the serious study of neurophysiology, it was axiomatic, the “scientific consensus,” that brain cells do not regenerate. The idea that they do regenerate was considered laughable. Now they do. The “Big Bang theory” was once derisively dismissed by astrophysicists, who then almost universally accepted a “steady-state” theory of the universe. Now the Big Bang rules the roost. In the nineteenth century, the “scientific consensus” was that mental disorders were inherited. In the twentieth century, under the influence of Freud, that view was overthrown. In the the twenty-first century, the “scientific consensus” has returned to the view held in the nineteenth, a topic on which I have commented several times, including here.

Until recently, less than 100 years ago, it was the “scientific consensus” that the “White Race” was superior to the other “races” of humans, a concept used to justify not only Nazism, but also slavery, segregation, and colonialism. Everyone believed it, including those who would count as political progressives by today’s reckoning. Not only do we now find such ideas disgusting, but the supposition that humans can be divided into “races” has undergone many changes, and it is now the “scientific consensus” that the concept of race is, at best, deeply flawed.

A “scientific consensus” can be useful in practical terms, because it guides research, but it can also stand in the way of progress, and can, at its worst, be used to support views of questionable moral content, Social Darwinism, for example. This may seem obvious, a commonplace hardly worth mentioning, except that the purportedly relevant “scientific consensus” is regularly employed by both AIDS activists and “global warming” activists to bludgeon critics. As I have demonstrated here, it is at best a treacherous form of argument. By its very nature, the “scientific consensus” has a way of changing. What was absolutely true yesterday can become little more than a joke today.

The New Year In Earnest

For me, the so-called holiday season does not end until my birthday, 8 January, a week after New Year’s Day, two weeks after Xmas, and otherwise known as Elvis’s Birthday. Although the years vary, at some time or another, starting about a week before Xmas and extending at least a few daze past my birthday, I go into a funk. Of course, I analyze to death my life in the previous year, and in the years before it. I mean “to death.”

I guess that today is one of those daze. It’s cold and my furnace stopped working. An electric heater unevenly warms my living room. The rest of the house is cold. Even the kitchen is a bit too chilly. For the last half hour or so, the afternoon sun has warmed the living room, but that’s always a bit too much when it’s happening, as is the case presently. I turned off the heater and already can feel a patch of cold. The furnace is crap when it is working. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

I am not in a good mood. Most of the day, I have continued the clerical nightmare of figuring out the continuing education piece of renewing my California psych license. Yesterday, I panicked when I realized that I couldn’t find documentation of a couple of one-unit courses I took online a couple of months ago. I found that today, only to discover that I need to fulfill not only a “law & ethics” requirement, but also a one-time requirement of courses on spousal abuse and aging (neither of which I need because I’ve been married and am aging). Another $100 or more out the door, in addition to the $410 renewal fee. I had been operating under the illusion that I was more or less done collecting CEUs over a year ago, when I received 30 hours for a hypnosis course. Fuck “renewal.”

Biopsy

After tons-o soul searching, I finally had my prostate biopsy on Monday. I was far less worried and nervous in the daze leading up to it than I ever expected. It’s true that I had to take some xanax the night before in order to fall asleep, and that I took some xanax while I was on my way to Kaiser Fontana. Nevertheless, I don’t credit the xanax with the main feelings I had, which did not meet my expectation that I would be all panicky.

The procedure was much less traumatic than my first prostate biopsy, about five years ago. There was no smell of burning flesh, the pain was less, and it was over more quickly, although the urologist took twice as many biopsy samples (12) as the first guy did. Here’s what I didn’t expect: Immediately after the procedure, I had to drive to my office in Temecula to see a couple who had rescheduled earlier in the day. When I got to my office, I went to take a piss. For the first two seconds or so, nothing came out except red, red blood. There were also blood clots. Let’s say that it was disconcerting. Also, the area in question hurt considerably following the procedure and for hours afterward. It’s the next day, and I feel OK, although there are twinges and I feel wiped out, perhaps as much from a long drive in the rain as from having been “probed.”

One weird thing is that I knew well in advance something that the urologist would say. This weekend while meditating I twice had the impression that he would tell me that he could see my prostate through his rectal periscope and that it looked like it was clean, or words to that effect. That’s exactly what happened. I didn’t ask him. He told me that he couldn’t see anything of concern.

I’m not quite sure why it was so un-traumatic. Maybe it was simply the time I had to consider what I wanted to do. Maybe it was all the meditation. I do know that a watershed moment came when I read Robert Masters’s account of his prostate cancer experience. He had a biopsy and therefore knows he has cancer; he’s undergoing alternative treatment. When I read that, I realized that I simply did not know where I stood, and suddenly wanted a biopsy. In addition, I trusted the urologist, once I met him, and knew he’d do a good job.

What We Find

It’s amazing how often self-exploration leads not to some comfortable place, but to an uncomfortable one.

“No” Fun

Saying “no” is notoriously hard for many people to do, at least some of the time. There is a simple reason for this: It makes us uncomfortable. If denying another person something he or she wants matters at all, it will not feel good. Possibly, I’ll feel guilty, because I owe the other person something or made a promise I can’t keep. I may feel sad, because I want the other person to have what he or she desires. Anger might predominate, because I believe that the other person has put me in an untenable position. Bottom line: It hurts.

Nevertheless, most of us react in puzzlement that the act of denying someone else’s wish should make us feel bad. We expect to feel cool and comfortable, NO MATTER WHAT, and hate anything that challenges those expectations. Reminding us, as it does, of the gap between fantasy and reality, having to say no engenders rage, a response that has little to do with the other people involved, but that can spill out onto them. Situations in which we must refuse a wish confront us directly with our struggle against the pain that life inevitably delivers. Thus, we twist and turn in avoidance or retreat into vagueness, impatient with our discomfort while waiting for the fun part, when the circumstances require a convincing utterance of the word “No.”

Why Intensification Works

It’s a commonplace of psychotherapy that intensifying negative feelings leads to a lessening of those feelings. The technique is used almost across the board in both  CBT and psychodynamic therapy. I’ve often wondered how that is, how making feelings stronger can cause them to attenuate. The simple, direct answer is that it brings the feelings under control, but there’s a circularity there, leaving unanswered the question of just how it happens, where the experience of control comes from. My tentative hypothesis is that intensifying the feelings  indicates someone who has those feelings, a doer of the intensifying act and therefore a doer of the feelings themselves. Self-awareness as that doer brings with it a realization that the feelings themselves are contained within and products of the larger Self who’s making it all happen, and can therefore make it stop. I dunno. Just considering.