Transparent Eye

So says Mark Vernon in the Guardian.

Wal-Mart caught telling its employees to vote Republican, according to the Wall Street Journal.

I’m more outraged, however, by it’s viciously anti-union activity. Basically, they take the nuclear alternative to unionization.

Through almost all of its 48-year history, Wal-Mart has fought hard to keep unions out of its stores, flying in labor-relations rapid-response teams from its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to any location where union activity was building. The United Food and Commercial Workers was successful in organizing only one group of Wal-Mart workers — a small number of butchers in East Texas in early 2000. Several weeks later, the company phased out butchers in all of its stores and began stocking prepackaged meat. When a store in Canada voted to unionize several years ago, the company closed the store, saying it had been unprofitable for years.

I would note that my father, years ago, was a member of a union that became a part of the UFCW.

I don’t think this is a humanistic company.

The ancient Greek mechanism is linked to Syracuse and possibly Archimedes.

The gunman who killed two at a UU church in Knoxville targeted the church because of its liberal views.

Police say a man opened fire at a Knoxville, Tenn., church yesterday because he couldn’t find a job and “his stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

More at Philocrites.

Coming from a Jewish background, I’m certainly not shocked by religious violence. But this is the first time I’ve read of UUs being specifically targeted. I don’t know what the mental status of the perpetrator is, but even guessing that he’s not quite right in the head, the choice of targets that mentally disturbed people make is often reflective of propaganda they are exposed to. In this, I am thinking of numerous cases where Jews are targeted, and the perpetrator is found to be disturbed. Sure, I’ve thought, that person was disturbed, but they didn’t pick their victim at random. They were conditioned by something in the society they lived in to hate that group of people.

David Brooks is obviously reading some of the same scholarly literature that I am regarding how people make choices.

Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.

He doesn’t go so far as to advocate regulation to limit what marketers can do. I would. For instance, I would restore limits on credit-card interest (also known as usury or loan-sharking limits) which seem to have disappeared. You can argue that people are free whether or not to borrow at ridiculous interest rates, but in fact, when people do, they are almost always making emotional decisions that are bad for them in the long run.

We don’t allow manufacturers to market automobiles with fuel tanks that routinely explode, and we should not allow financial services companies to sell products that are inherently unsafe. The motto of the Bush administration seems to be, “There’s a sucker born ever minute, and that’s good for us.”

According to this NY Times article, it’s mostly associated with funerals, and even being supplanted there.

I previously did a post on I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis by Jerry White based on sample chapters that were online. I’ve now been sent the full book to review and it does live up to the good expectations set up in the introductory chapters..

White is the co-founder of Survivor Corps who lost his leg to a land mine. He’s written something that looks like a self-help book, but it feels to me that its written at a higher level than what you would expect from the genre.

Based on his own experience and the experience of others described in the book, he distills a five-point program

o Face facts
o Choose life
o Reach out
o Get moving
o Give back

I think Buddhist readers will find the book compassionate and valuable. It’s about dealing with suffering and moving beyond it. White mentions mindfulness, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Lama Surya Das. He talks about letting go of attachment to the person you were before your loss as an essential step in re-empowering yourself. The final step, giving back, is a recognition that one is no longer so needy, and you even have enough resources to share with others.

Humanists will like much of it, but be uncomfortable in spots with the light spirituality. White recommends faith and prayer, but he does not seem to believe in miracles or a God who responds to prayers in a direct way. Still, Daniel Dennett wouldn’t like his belief in belief

My hypothesis is that faith and prayer activate the reward circuits in the brain, which have a role in the placebo response. Placebo-based expectations have real, therapeutic effects on pain and depression. These are not bad things, unless they motivate you to oppress those who pray and believe differently than you do.

I see White’s message as stoic in the ancient Greek sense, where one recognizes that one has control over one’s inner state even if the outer world presents great difficulties. He quotes his wife saying, “We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change our minds about it.” That’s out of Epictetus.

Often, the word stoic is used to describe people who shut up and suffer. That is not the original sense of the term, nor what is advocated in this book. Facing facts, he says, is about letting in the pain. He does at one point quote an older woman who says that people today chatter too much about their pain, but he doesn’t seem to fully endorse that view.

He doesn’t like whining, however. He wants people to get beyond the sense of being victims. Some might find that objectionable. Some might even say that it interferes with social justice work to prevent future victims. But White’s role in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines suggests that becoming empowered does not require that one forget about injustice.

White brings up a term I had not heard of before, post-traumatic growth, as something that can happen in the wake of tragedy, especially when it gives a survivor a new sense of purpose. He also says that in his experience, grief counseling has not been very effective, an issue that has been raised elsewhere.

Overall, I feel it’s a good contribution a literature of stoicism that shows we can adjust to dire circumstances and make more from them than would normally be expected.

We had about a dozen people at the meeting today at the Andala Coffee House.

Our discussion started off with the reading, Existentialism as Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre

Pretty much everyone rejected his argument that there is no human nature because essense precedes existence.

Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.

reasoning that human nature is an expression of our genetics inheritence, and while there are individual differences, there are commonalities of human behavior that in no way depend on the existence of a god.

We are a bit more divided on the question of whether human beings are free, and Satre’s vision of freewill.

For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism–man is free, man is freedom.

We certainly have the feeling that we have the ability to freely choose between alternatives. But many people have the feeling that a god exists. Feelings don’t provide a strong basis for proving something.

People do have habitual behaviors. One of the techniques that religion uses is to drum expectations and habits into children before they know enough to question them. From habit, we act in a deterministic and stereotyped way.

But we also have the ability to override habitual behavior. From this, we can get creative. People raised in religion can break away from the teachings that were instilled in them through this ability to override habits.

But is the ability to override automatic behavior determined in a more subtle way?

No one made an argument for full determinism.

We talked about whether quantum physics could provide the basis for freewill.

A physicist in attendance gave us a quick summary of some recent thinking on quantum physics. While there has been talk, especially in New Age circles, that quantum mechanics restores freewill because consciousness is involved in resolving the superpositions of indeterminate states (see Schrödinger’s Cat ), a new view, called decoherence, is that quantum superpositions decay as they are exposed to the wider environment. It does not require consciousness to resolve the quantum state.

This resolution seems to produce random outcomes. The architecture of the brain is small enough that quantum effects could make a difference whether a neuron fires or not. So the brain may not be a deterministic device, but rather a device that produces outcomes with some randomness mixed in. This provides the basis of non-stereotyped, creative behavior. But it doesn’t allow for metaphysical freewill, since evidence that a soul or even that consciousness than affect what happens at the quantum level.

If we don’t believe in a soul or freewill, that does not mean we can’t have morality. If behavior is the result of genes and environment, having laws and prisons are environmental factors that make people behave in ways that society prefers.

We debated Sartre’s conclusion

Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

We had disagreement over whether it was religion or dogmatism that was the real problem. Non-believers in god can be dogmatic–say over whether the death penalty should be banned–but overall, believers tend to be more dogmatic.

We had one religious person amongst us, who said that it was really a matter of whether you struggle over difficult moral questions, or whether you think you have a direct channel to god or a book or authority that gives you all the answers without having to think about them.

I recommend A Murder in Lemberg, the story of rare intracommunal violence in the Jewish community in 19th century Poland. A reform rabbi was poisoned, most likely by an Orthodox Jew. The motive was probably not strictly related to the victim’s religious liberalism, but quite possibly due to institutional reforms he proposed that would have affected some commercial interests.

Lemberg was then part of the Habsburg empire and is now Lviv in Ukraine. The reform rabbi was initially favored by the Austrian authorities because he spoke German rather than Yiddish and thus had a germanizing influence on his flock. However, the rabbi proved to be a liberal in the revolutionary year of 1848, the year he was murdered. By the time the investigation of his murder took place, the authorities were favoring the orthodox community, because even if non-German speaking, they were inherently conservative and anti-revolutionary.

The author has reported a very interesting story relying on archival material that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Experts Question Using Placebo Pills to Treat Children

With the help of her husband, Dennis, she founded a placebo company, and, without a hint of irony, named it Efficacy Brands. Its chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets, Obecalp, for placebo spelled backward, goes on sale on June 1 at the Efficacy Brands Web site. Bottles of 50 tablets will sell for $5.95. The Buettners have plans for a liquid version, too.

Because they contain no active drug, the pills will not be sold as a drug under Food and Drug Administration rules. They will be marketed as dietary supplements, meaning they can be sold at groceries, drugstores and discount stores without a prescription.

“This is designed to have the texture and taste of actual medicine so it will trick kids into thinking that they’re taking something,” Ms. Buettner said. “Then their brain takes over, and they say, ‘Oh, I feel better.’ ”

Some ethicists have a problem with parents lying to their children. Not having children, I can’t comment about it. All in all, however, I think it’s admirable that the makers of this non-drug are being up front about it, as compared to the large variety of alternative therapies and herbal supplements which most scientists believe to be nothing but placebos.