Institutions and Language (2): Loss of imagination

Recently I was thinking about how it feels to feel not quite right and yet not know how to describe it. I suppose I am not talking about a vague queasy feeling or anything of that sort. Imagine instead, if you can, a rather "psychological" malady in which you don't quite feel like yourself, or you don't feel as you think you ought, or you are committing repeated failures of character that you just can't seem to control. Or perhaps you feel just a bit of madness. Whatever it is, there is the distinct feeling that something is wrong and that it is not, at least symptomatically, physical. In what ways can we say to someone, "Excuse me, something is wrong with me" when we find this to be the case?

Ignoring the reader's potential desire to psychoanalyze me here, let's continue with what I was thinking the other day. What, for example, do you tell someone is "wrong"? At this point, perhaps you start searching the internet for a list of symptoms that match your own, even if, at this point, you are not quite clear what the symptoms are beyond a feeling that something is wrong or that you just haven't been quite right. This brings me to the particular neurosis that I wondered about. I wonder if someone desperately searching Google for a diagnosis has not at some point simply adopted symptoms of another simply to make it clear that something is wrong. Say, for example, someone has some unnamed psychological burden that does not "cause" alcoholism but for whom alcoholism becomes a way to declare that burden in a way that is no longer "in your head".

Maybe this seems far-fetched. Maybe. But maybe it is not. It would be a hard thing to test - precisely because it lies at the very margin of our ability to measure (which is the cornerstone of diagnosis). There are, I think, several "syndromes" that act as catch-alls in medicine, a way of saying "You hurt, but I don't know why". And equally, there are mental health diagnoses that are so subjective that self-diagnosis might seem to be step up in objectivity were it not for our predispositions to behaviorism (I'm reminded of the behaviorist joke: A couple of behaviorists slept together. Afterwards one looked to the other and said, "It was great for you, but how was it for me?).

It strikes me that the real tragedy here might be the atrophied ability to describe what's wrong in the first place and to communicate it. Bombarded by lists and check-lists of common symptoms, perhaps we are just losing our imagination for navigating our own psychology, in the process simplifying the mind to a set of banal faculties.

How does this tie into "institutions"? It ties in through language, and how the language that we use to describe our mental lives comes to shape the possibilities available for those lives. The types of diagnosis we offer, the standards for those diagnoses, and the legitimacy of pain that does not fit those diagnoses has the power to shape what people can feel and communicate. In this sense, mental health care based on a narrow scientism has the real potential of making us more psychologically uniform in experience and yet perhaps infinitely less "healthy". It's too much to aim at offering any sort of satisfying alternative in this post. Let it suffice that I think we should cultivate the ability for all people to communicate the richness of their experience. This means we need to train people both to speak in rich terms and to listen in great depth. These sorts of things only happen in a community.

There will be some who read this and say, "Yes but..." and list all the potentially harmful forms of mental illness, harmful both to the sufferer and their neighbors. That is a legitimate concern, but it's precisely the type of concern that tosses baby out every time we empty the bath water. At root, I think that "Yes, but..." is founded on the fear that someone else's well-being might depend on my willingness and ability to listen to and understand what's going on with my neighbor. It's Cain's dilemma all over again except that now we are killing our brother (and even ourselves) by slowly eroding the possibility for life. It's a poisoning corrosion of the mental leaving us gradually more fragile.

Institutions and Language

When a friend and I started getting to know some homeless folks that lived around our neighborhood, we developed a distinctly anti-institutional bias when it comes to relationships with the poor. That is not a bias against the existence of any institutions. It is rather a bias against filtering relationships through institutional allegiances. The clearest example is that of the social worker. Again, this is not to say that we shouldn't have social workers or that they do a bad job. It's just to make the point that the relationship between social worker and client (i.e., poor person) should not be the norm for relationships between poor and middle class people. That is to say, while poor people may lack many things and middle class graduate students may have a lot of things, it's a mistake to let this define the relationship. There's no possibility of friendship if the poor person is always the beneficiary and the middle class person is the benefactor. Nor is there the possibility of friendship if the relationship is based in the interaction between an institution (gov't or charity) and a poor person. Because, as I heard straight from the mouth of a charity worker, at the end of the day they go home. The poor are clients not friends.

Today I ran across a quote from Peter Winch, a Wittgensteinian philosopher, that was very much along these lines:

"Take the notion of friendship; we read in Penelope Hall’s book The Social Services of Modern England (Routledge) that it is the duty of a social worker to establish a relationship of friendship with her clients; but that she must never forget that her first duty is to the policy of the agency by which she is employed. Now that is a debasement of the notion of friendship as it has been understood, which has excluded this sort of divided loyalty, not to say double dealing. To the extent to which the old idea gives way to this new one social relationships are impoverished (or if anyone objects to the interpolation of personal moral attitudes, at least they are changed). It will not do, either, to say that the mere change in the meaning of a word need not prevent people from having the relations to each other they want to have, for this is to overlook the fact that our language and our social relations are just two different sides of the same coin. To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters."

Now, that's the background on my attitude toward institutions. I'm wondering today if there isn't similarly problematic aspects of "institutional language" in science. I mean, is it helpful to talk about "science" at all. It seems to me that "science" has itself taken an almost institutional form (I'll refer to this institutional notion of science as Science from here on). For example, we refer to "science" all the time when justifying positions. "Modern science has taught us..." or "The methods of science ensure that..." So, what is this Science to which we refer? Do scientists serve Science by conducting their work in a way that is similar, say, to a social worker's work serving the government? At the end of the day, what relationship obtains between a scientist and his/her work and is it helpful to refer to Science? Is there the danger of a sort of "double dealing" in the scientist?

One danger that is similar to that of the social worker is that the attribution of an institutional allegiance (however abstract the institution) only seems to muddy the waters of person-to-person interactions. I would state it as virtually axiomatic, if not just obvious, that allegiance to Science cannot trump the demands of basic person-to-person interaction. This is, however, not an obvious claim to many scientists and I think that many would outright disagree with me. But what is it about Science that trumps person-to-person relationships? We're getting at the heart of utilitarianism here, I think. My relationship with you, my friend, is expendable (if not to say that you are yourself also expendable) for the sake of Science because the results will serve so many people. Science demands it. But who is Science to demand it? That's a deep question. Does society demand it of you via the institution of Science? Would our whole society be disappointed in a scientist if he did not sacrifice personal relationships for Science? In practice this seems not to be the case, but the standards are pretty low. Rather, society often just offers very heavy rewards to those who have sacrificed much in the service of Science.

But again, what is Science? Does the scientist do something fundamentally different from everyone else - that is, in service to Science?

If we take my tack from earlier and suggest that science is just careful reasoning and experimentation, then it seems more than a little awkward to suggest to my friend that "careful reasoning and experiment demand that I betray my friendship to you". You may think that the example is melodramatic, but my point is that we are, even scientists, always dealing directly with immediate human relationships and should avoid the temptation to abstract them. And so, when does careful reasoning lead one to betrayal? We can hope that it does so only very very rarely.

At the end of the day I'm wondering a couple of things. (1) Does utilitarian reasoning require this sort of institutional abstraction? Do I have to be able to separate "the issues" from my particular relationship and consequent duties to you in order to think in terms of the "greater good". (2) Is talk of institutionalized Science just a vehicle for this sort of utilitarianism. If so, then maybe the personalism of Peter Maurin and the integral humanism of Jacques Maritain have very serious implications for the practice of science.

At the end of the day I think we have to face the possibility that a scientist is never in service to Science. He is rather in service to truth. If you're a Christian then, that means being in service to God and neighbor. I could go on by talking about abstracting the term "neighbor", a practice that I think is similarly a vehicle for utilitarianism. However, I don't think it is right to abstract it, or institutionalize it, and I think it's clear why.

So a scientist is someone who uses careful reasoning and experimentation to pursue the truth. Well then, I reckon a scientist is pretty much just like everyone else. In practice, scientists specialize on a particular topic. This specialization does not, however, introduce any new allegiances to Science or anything else. Nor does the norm of specialization become an allegiance itself. We try to hard to institutionalize roles in our society. In doing so we create duplicitous relationships because of divided allegiances. It's latent in the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" because it sets before us a set of recognized possibilities, institutions. Those become our goals, they receive our allegiance.

Instead, perhaps we can just encourage our children to think carefully and experiment with the world around them, not for the sake of manipulation but for understanding, paying careful attention to their neighbor so that when they are older they are continually learning how to live better. Then maybe they can claim really to be a scientist, even if they have no formal education, no job, and no money.

Education and Annihilation

"That's what education does. It makes the world personal."

That's a line from a suicidal caucasian professor in Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited. A significant factor in his descent toward suicide is his "realization" that culture, art, and philosophy are in reality quite "fragile" and valueless. The quote above is a response to the observation that his education seems to be at least partly responsible for his desire to kill himself. The observer notes that his reasons sound very impersonal since they all concern rather abstract ideas about "the world", so it's "nothing personal", right? The professor responds that it IS personal. Education makes the world personal, he says.

This is fascinating little passage to me. The professor is utterly convinced that abstract ideas are "personal". To me this is in part a play on the word "personal". There is a colloquial sense to this word whereby the professor is saying something akin to "it is very important to me" but in a very special way. The play on "personal" is that there is obviously not another person involved. "The world" is not a person, so in a sense we can take the professor to be confused about what a personal issue would be - he has lost a sense of person. Still a third use of "personal" is akin to "private". It's another way to say "it's about me, not you." In this case the professor is saying that education makes the world about him, a rather narcissistic, if not solipsistic claim. Rolling all three into a single meaningful statement I think sums up the professors dilemma: Abstractions have become important to him in a way that has taken the place of other people as interlocutors. The world has been reduced to his relationship with abstractions, and now he finds no reason to live.

His psychosis then butts up against the concreteness of a man standing in his way on the train platform as he tries to throw himself in front of the train. "The world" can't offer him a reason not to end his life or even reach out to grab his collar to stop him. Instead a person does this, albeit a stranger. There's nothing abstract about the ex-convict on the platform who inadvertently foils the suicide. It is even darkly comic that the professor fails even to see the man standing on the platform when he rushes toward the oncoming train. He is so taken with his "personal abstractions" that he fails to see the one impediment to the culmination of his view of the world: a person standing between him and self-annihilation. This is significant I think.

The debate that follows this encounter makes up the entirety of the book. I won't spoil the rest. I will just say something about the reviewers. Several reviews that I have read of the book seem to find the professor with the upper hand in the debate with the ex-convict when their interaction concludes. One states that "McCarthy draws down the darkness" and another that the book is "a poem in celebration of death". Without going into more detail here (though I plan to later), I think the reviewers are rather daft. That's in part to say that I don't think McCarthy stoops to offer us a winner and a loser in the debate. The book may be more about incommensurability (and maybe Kierkegaard's "leap of faith") than it is an endorsement of any "worldview". It is, I think, in with the very best of literature because it faithfully renders the complexity of trying to negotiate life (when death is a choice) in the face of uncertainty. He doesn't lower himself into the abysmal politics of using the book to make a point. Instead, I think he's trying to point at something that can't be said directly; he can only point to this conversation and say "It's there, if you'll see it - even if I can't say what 'it' is."

It makes me wonder if McCarthy is a reader of Wittgenstein...

RIP Fess

It's a sad day. Fess Parker, star of the Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone TV series in the 1950's died two days ago. I watched more than a few of those shows and much of my childhood imagination was fueled by Parker's Crockett.

Dualisms and Neurotransmitters

What I have to say here is based on a NY Times article I read several months ago. You can find it here. Take a couple of minutes to read it, because the rest of this is a critique of aspects of the article.

Consider this sentence taken from the article: "Should the brain want to ignore what it might otherwise notice, dopamine must be muzzled." What strikes me about this sentence is how it mixes the idea of the brain as an autonomous agent (or the defining organ of a larger agent, say, me) with the notion of the brain as a simple chemo-biological mechanism. That is, if you or I want to ignore something we have to find some way to block dopamine in our brain. But how is this different from deciding to ignore something? Presumably when we make an effort to concentrate (i.e., decide to ignore other things), that too has biochemical effects in the brain, perhaps even the "blocking" of dopamine. Ah! But here we're getting into the meet of my problem: I said making an effort has biochemical "effects". Really, shouldn't we just say that making this effort is a biochemical occurrence. Otherwise we are some form of dualist, asserting that biochemical reactions cause certain mental states.

My impression is that, in fact, most writing concerning neuroscience is largely dualistic in its approach. This is ironic. Really. Scientists are ever angling toward scientific materialism and yet they preserve these patterns of dualistic speech in which it is at least implied that mental states (e.g., feeling happy) are caused/affected by the presence or absence of certain chemicals in the brain.

And there's the paradox. The folks who claim to be scientific materialists are, I think, generally dualists. They would tend to think of dopamine as having a causal relation to "internal states". In the applications of such research they will want to prescribe some treatment that is supposed to affect these internal states. On the other hand, if we do away with this dualism we wind up thinking that one's psychological experience is not separate from my physical experience and thus we might start trying to treat our psychology by doing the right things with our bodies. By that I mean, what I think must affect my brain chemistry (because my brain chemistry is what I think... it does not "cause" what I think). So, being trained to think well must be linked (quite strongly?) with "good" brain chemistry. What we do with our minds (whether we give in to desires, petty feelings, etc.) must be reflected in brain chemistry. Similarly for the rest of the body. What we do with our bodies affects/is affected by what we do with our minds. This is the unity of human experience.

This is all to say that at least part of the time that we're treating "chemical imbalances" in the brain, we might ought to be teaching people to live better. That is to say, virtue must be related to happiness and vice versa (didn't St. Thomas already say that?). I will go further and say that being continually exposed to sin in the form of sexual temptation, murder, etc. (yes, TV is a great example... how many shows are fundamentally about murder?), might logically cause chemical imbalances in our brains: it might cause us to sin and be less happy.

So there. In other writings I've argued that sin affects the weather. Now I'm arguing that sin affects your dopamine levels.

If blogs aren't good for bold, sweeping statements, what are they good for?

Doctored Up and Reading Again

On December 8, 2009 I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics focus). As of Feb 2, 2010 I am starting to come out of the haze that was finishing my Ph.D.

What's happening now? Well, on Dec 14, 2009 I started a postdoc at a nearby (but different) university. Though I'm a postdoc at a new place, I still basically feel like a student, except that I now have a lot more meetings to attend. My new work is more hydrologic, and at least in the short term, less scientific. That is, I'm effectively working on a policy study for the state government. It's glorified technician work. The appeal for me is that it is a project that will affect water management and pollution in my backyard (speaking somewhat figuratively). I mean, it will literally affect my backyard, but only as a little piece of an entire watershed. The project integrates economic theory, watershed modeling and behavioral psychology to figure out how to most efficiently (and effectively) reduce nitrogen loads in local drinking water reservoirs. So, there's the draw: it's immanently practical. The drawback is pretty much the same point. There's very little science in the sense of figuring out something new about how the world works. We are, instead, applying what we know (in theory) to a particular place.

I've also been reading again. Recently I've read a large pile of papers about rivers and ecology, started Bill Cronon's book Changes in the Land, and Silence by Shusaku Endo. This morning I read an essay by Donald Worster called "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History". It's an earlier environmental history article (~1990) that outlines some of the ways the free market and land use have interacted for better or worse on the way to making a case for viewing history with an "agroecological" lens because "whatever terrain the environmental historian chooses to investigate, he has to address the age-old problem of how humankind can feed itself without degrading the primal source of life."

In addition I am a hundred pages or so into Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is a sociological investigation of the vocation/occupation of scientist over the course of the 20th century. So far, it's fascinating. Perhaps I'll post a review when I'm done. I also just finished a biography of St. Francis by Julienne Green entitled God's Fool, one of the better bios in my opinion.

On the list for the near future: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle which looks very promising but I haven't gotten to it yet, The Path Between the Seas a big book about the construction of the Panama Canal by David McCullough, and The Brothers Karamazov. That's the short list of readings that are coming up. But there's a far longer list behind those.

Right now, though, it's back to work. I'm taking the new job as an opportunity to be more diligent about keeping up with the state of research in scientific disciplines related to my work (which means reading a one or two dozen papers a month) as well as learning to program in C++, navigating Linux, and extending my Mathematica and Matlab skills.